‘Keane’: Inside the head of a frantic dad

In a wholly unexpected and ultimately gratifying experience from writer-director Lodge Kerrigan, “Keane” is emotionally involving right from the beginning through its final frame. Wandering around Manhattan’s bustling Port Authority bus terminal is a trim young man with dark red hair, William Keane (Damian Lewis, in a demanding and illuminating portrayal), and he becomes increasingly agitated as he tries to retrace the last moments he spent with his 6-year-old daughter, who suddenly vanished. For about a week the divorced Clifton, N.J., housepainter and sometime construction worker has been holed up in a grim bunker of a motel in North Bergen, N.J., spending his days at the terminal, going over the purported abduction and stopping people to ask if they had seen his daughter. As the days wear on, Keane assuages his pain with hits of cocaine, slugs of vodka and a desperate attempt at quick sex.

His anxiety is very nearly as painful to watch as it is for him to experience, but returning to the motel one evening he witnesses a young woman, Lynn (Amy Ryan), with a 7-year-old daughter, Kira (Abigail Breslin), wrangling with the manager over a bill. Realizing the mother and daughter are staying in a room next to him, Keane knocks on their door and persuades the reluctant Lynn to accept $100, thus drawing him into an acquaintance with the mother and daughter, who have been living at the hotel for several weeks, awaiting word from Lynn’s husband, relocated to Albany and looking for affordable housing for his family.

Diverted from his obsession for the moment and warming to companionship, William emerges as the likable, considerate man he is at heart. He doesn’t tell Lynn about his tragic loss, merely that he’s divorced and looking for a job. There’s an attraction between William and Lynn, who has a waitress job at a nearby cafe while Kira attends school, but it’s adorable, self-possessed little Kira who steals his heart and brings out his most tender paternal instincts. The point about William Keane is that he is a good man coping with a devastating loss that threatens his very sanity, to which he struggles to hold on without any support system. Lynn and Kira provide him a sense of family and therefore relief from his pain, but clearly it’s only temporary. It’s at this point “Keane” takes off into its most harrowing direction.

Aided by a most resourceful and empathetic cinematographer, John Foster, Kerrigan, whose first feature was the widely acclaimed “Clean, Shaven” (1994), seems to be trusting an intuition that never fails him. His focus naturally is primarily on Keane, yet he captures the relentlessly drab and impersonal urban landscapes in a way that reinforces the terrible isolation of William’s anguished odyssey. As a rigorous filmmaker, Kerrigan eschews conventional exposition, which raises the possibility that William may be sufficiently deranged to have imagined his daughter’s presumed abduction, perhaps even the child’s existence. Tantalizing as this may sound, Kerrigan doesn’t seem to be the kind of filmmaker who’s playing with a tricky ambiguity, and Keane’s recollections of the last moments leading up to his daughter’s disappearance seem too vivid to be anything but excruciatingly real.

*

‘Keane’

MPAA rating: R for a scene of strong sexuality, drug use and language

Times guidelines: Adult themes, far too intense for children

A Magnolia Pictures release. Writer-director Lodge Kerrigan. Producer Andrew Fierberg. Executive producer Steven Soderbergh. Cinematographer John Foster. Editor Andrew Hafitz. Costumes Catherine George. Production designer Petra Barchi. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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