'Public Enemies': Johnny Depp brings outlaw John Dillinger to life

"He might be sitting among you," intones a narrator, urgent and dramatic, in a newsreel at a crowded 1930s movie house. "Turn to your right. Turn to your left." Everybody turns, except John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), a very public enemy cheerfully hiding in plain sight — at the movies.

Michael Mann's stylish "Public Enemies" takes us through the eventful last 14 months of Dillinger's life: a prison breakout of his crew in 1933, a spree of bank robberies and high living (through which he became something of a folk hero), an elaborate game of chase with various G-men, and a final, famous gunning down outside a movie house where "Manhattan Melodrama" was playing. It's a fast-paced, fedora-filled blur — sometimes a literal blur, thanks to the digital camerawork — and it's always engaging. Yet John Dillinger remains a cipher; by the movie's end, we've seen his story but not his soul.

The problem isn't Depp's performance; he's here a dark-eyed, few-words tough guy who's capable of pouring on the charm. To pretty coat-check girl Billie Frechette (the Betty Boop-eyed Marion Cotillard, of "La Vie en Rose") he recites a list of what he likes — "Baseball movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you. What else do you need to know?" — and he's got her, just like that; she falls like a house of cards. He moves in his serge suits with feline grace, rarely smiling. Like Billie, we can't take our eyes off him.

Similarly intense is Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the FBI agent charged with bringing Dillinger down. Bale may be a little overexposed at the moment; when he ponders strategy, you can't help thinking that it's Bruce Wayne considering whether to descend to the Batcave. He gives a thoughtful performance, but Mann and his co-writers don't make Purvis as compelling a character as Dillinger. It seems almost an unfair match; you just wait for Dillinger to return to the screen. Cotillard is vivid and lovely, and gets one very dramatic scene in an FBI office that just might make you gasp (I did), but the movie's not as interested in her; Billie is mostly a standard girlfriend role.

But Mann ("The Insider," "Collateral") knows exactly how to pace this kind of movie, set to a veritable symphony of gunshots, and "Public Enemies" feels both wonderfully populated and beautifully controlled. Fine actors keep popping up in tiny, meticulously detailed roles (watch for Lili Taylor, Giovanni Ribisi and Leelee Sobieski, among others), and the movie's tension never flags, right up to its final, excruciatingly slo-mo betrayal. The movie left me both satisfied and wanting to know more about Dillinger, whose strange charisma — entangled with the oddball brilliance that is Depp — haunts the movie. "I hide out among them," says Dillinger of the public, who cheer him on. "I gotta care what they think."

Moira Macdonald:

206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com