Breach

Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Jonathan Keltz, Chris Cooper, Aaron Abrams, Laura Linney

Directed by: Billy Ray

RS: 3.5of 4 Stars

2007 Universal Studios All Movies

Just when you're thinking every new American film belongs in the Bomb Squad, along comes Breach to win one for our side. Put Chris Cooper in the running pronto for next year's Best Actor Oscar. He's electrifying as Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent, Opus Dei Roman Catholic, devoted family man, lover of strippers and rabid porn buff -- he makes videos of himself boffing his wife (Kathleen Quinlan) -- who, until 2001, spent twenty-two years selling secrets to the Russians, including the identities of spies in their midst who were killed on his intel.

Director and co-writer Billy Ray, who detailed the misconduct of journalist Stephen Glass at The New Republic in 2003's Shattered Glass -- here raises the stakes to life and death, and proves himself a filmmaker of uncommon talent and ambition. Ryan Phillippe plays Eric O'Neill, the ambitious FBI novice assigned by his bureau superior Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney, adding bruising wit to a stock character) to get the goods on Hanssen by serving as his D.C. clerk. At first, O'Neill -- who worked as a consultant on the film -- is told just of the porn angle. Only later is he let in on the extent of Hanssen's crimes.

Spying on a master spy is a palm-sweating challenge, and Ray milks these scenes for maximum suspense. It's a cat-and-mouse game played out in drab offices and shabby corridors, which ace cinematographer Tak Fujimoto lights to capture the bilious underside of the espionage business. More John le Carre gravity than Ian Fleming glam, Breach succeeds more tellingly than Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd at revealing the human and moral toll of choosing betrayal as a vocation.

Phillippe, coming off surprisingly solid work in Flags of Our Fathers and the Oscar-winning Crash, excels at evoking the churning insides of a man trained to face the wall of Hanssen's darkening contradictions by showing nothing. Ray avoids psychobabble to explain away Hanssen. Wise move. In this steadily gripping hothouse of a thriller, it's Cooper -- funny, fierce and bug-wild -- who gives us a look into the abyss.