Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (Jojo Whilden/Weinstein Company)

After seeing the sixth feature film from director David O. Russell (best known for The Fighter and Three Kings), I’m still not sure if I’d use such platitudes as “one of the best movies of the year.” Its emotional honesty is palpable even as the plot (as much as it is) takes some crazy turns. It’s messy at times, but so are the lives of the two main characters.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) has just been released after eight months from a mental hospital (which the courts, though not quite the doctors, think is okay) following an “incident”: coming home one fine day, seeing clothes strewn about on the stairs leading up to the bathroom, he thinks his wife has something romantic planned for him—and he finds her with another man instead. At which point, Pat brutally assaulted him. Thereafter when Pat hears Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour,” his wedding song AND the song Tanya chose to play while sexing it up with the other guy, Pat kinda goes berserk.

The part up until the Stevie Wonder song sounds understandable, almost, on paper, except that Pat is bipolar with aggressive mood swings, and he doesn’t coming from totally sane genes, either. His father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), is an obsessive-compulsive gambler, possibly with his own anger issues. The simple facts in this case aside, what comes next for Pat, now that he’s out? He has to have a strategy (or a catchphrase later used to ironic effect, “Excelsior”) to get his wife back. This wouldn’t be an issue except for that blasted restraining order.

Enter Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence, with black hair!), someone Pat already knows but mostly tangentially. When Pat first sees her, Russell deliberately reveals details from Pat’s POV: a bit of her cleavage, sure, but also her black-painted fingernails, a necklace, and then her face, looking at Pat with a frank “like what you see?” expression. He’s surprised she returns the attention, nor does he expect her to ask him to sleep with her, “but only with the lights off,” not when he still considers himself married, and certainly not when Tiffany, whose cop husband died suddenly in a hit and run accident, kinda, sorta considers herself married, too—she still wears her wedding ring.

Details of the plot are and aren’t important in equal measure. You got to know who the characters are, but by the way the plot turns, these two have no choice but to behave like they do. As we’ve seen before with Russell (I Heart Huckabees), he cares more about behavior than plot mechanics, not to mention he likes his actors to improvise. And boy does it show in a good way. In other hands, this could be trite material or made fluffy. But Russell, with a taste for deliciously crazy screwball comedy with a dramatic flair, goes further. These aren’t the seemingly normal characters of a romantic comedy who may not-so secretly be sociopaths. They’re clinically problematic. They know it and embrace it with blunt honesty, providing for cringe-producing comedy in some scenes and liberating laughter in others. This is fresh, genre-bending filmmaking.

Cooper is electric here, giving off high-wire emotions one scene to next, but equally alive is Lawrence. She has another level of the “crazy” on display (different medications after all), but even when her character seems to know too much about other people or, well, sport team statistics, she’s breathtaking in how she’ll not steal a scene. She reminds you through her burning intensity why everything for this character and those around her matters.

As Pat’s mom, Jacki Weaver may be the most conventional role of the bunch, the hopeful and probably sanest of the family. Chris Tucker… where did he come from?! Of all the roles to take after 15 years in Rush Hour wasteland, this is a fascinating if small part, that of Pat’s charming and funny friend. (Gone are the Tucker tics that wore out their welcome after a few years in the ’90s.)

Most important, Robert De Niro’s performance reminded me, shockingly, of how long it’s been since he’s been given material this good (maybe, I don’t know, 10 years, maybe more?). You want to dislike his wounded and deeply flawed character, but he’s just Pat’s dad, an older, more sports-crazy image of his son, though, in a couple of key moments, just as painfully, emotionally vulnerable. Where has this De Niro been all this time? It took David O. Russell, I guess, who can be crazy on his own terms (for example, his infamous meltdown on the Huckabees set), to dig him out.