Phoenix brings unsettling vibe to 'You Were Never Really Here'

Joaquin Phoenix is a very unsettling leading man. In movie after movie (and sometimes in real life) he brings a jarring, off-kilter energy that feels truly dangerous in a way that say, traditional action movie stars don't. It's that borderline creepy persona that is front in center in the moody new melodrama You Were Never Really Here, and it serves Phoenix and the movie well.

Durector Lynne Ramsey's violent and minimalist crime film is already drawing comparisons to Taxi Driver, and while I don't think it's in the same league as that masterpiece, it does cast a flinty, quiet spell of its own.

It is also relentlessly bleak.

Without spoiling too much of the film's relatively threadbare plot, it revolves around a hitman-enforcer type -- played by Phoenix in a way that resembles a gone-too-seed John Wick -- who gets more than he bargained for what he's set on a mysterious mission to rescue an abducted girl and exact vengeance on her kidnappers.

And while the plot may scream pulp, the film sprinkles in lots of little eccentric notes and asides that suggest plenty about Phoenix's character's troubled past. As far Phoenix, his expressive face holds the screen for much of the film's running time and while he rarely speaks above a murmur, he is haunting in this film.

So much of his craft can sometimes be too showy -- which is probably why his quitting-acting-to-become-a-rapper stunt from a few years back landed with such a thud. He still hasn't stopped being a bit of a mannered actor, and I don't think I could ever see him doing a full-blown comedy or romance (although his rumored future turn as The Joker will be interesting) but this moody tone poem of a movie fits him like a glove.

At times, it recalls the Nicholas Winding Refn-Ryan Gosling movies Drive and Only God Forgives, but while those films leaned into their stylishness more, You Were Never Really There expects the audience to work a little more.

Critics are loving the movie, but I am very curious if audiences will ever be on board. It's a pretty brutal, unflinching movie -- and while Phoenix is electric on-screen he isn't as warm or inviting a committed character actor as say, Daniel Day-Lewis, who is watchable in virtually anything.

Hell, he was even unnerving as a child actor in the movie Parenthood.

It's also an odd time for a quirky prestige movie like this to come out, and so I imagine like Good Time last year and Green Room before that, both smart, stylistic genre films that delivered both thrills and real drama, it'll likely be forgotten in the latter half of the year's award season race.

But even if it is snubbed it deserves to be embraced as a major work by its director Lynne Ramsey and another major triumph for its iconoclastic star.