Clockers.

Peck's bad boy makes good. That's the gist of what most critics have written about Spike Lee's Clockers. You can hear the sigh of relief rustling through their analyses. Ticked off by the in-your-face cockiness of Lee's earlier films and especially by what they took to be the reverse racism and incendiary promptings of Do the Right Thing, reviewers are now expressing gratified surprise at the unambiguous and unexceptionable messages of this movie: selling drugs will turn you into a corpse; the violence of outlaws eventually plagues the innocent; contempt for law-abiding, upwardly striving blacks by other blacks is deplorable. Most startling of all, perhaps, is the portrayal of the chief cop in this movie, Harvey Keitel's homicide detective, as a basically decent man--this from the number-one, cinematic scourge of the N.Y.P.D! No wonder that the fatted calf has been requisitioned and a banquet of praise laid on.

I'm afraid I can contribute only to the first course. There are things to praise in Clockers and some of them are artistic as well as moral. For this story, adapted from Richard Price's novel, about a young drug dealer who finds himself under suspicion for a murder to which his older brother has already confessed, Spike Lee provides an asphalt jungle setting of poetic veraciousness that plunges the viewer into heat, noise, and a sort of becalmed desperation interrupted by violence. While Lee's usual cameraman, Ernest Dickerson, always mellowed Lee's movies with a salmon-hued, late-afternoon light, Malik Hassan Sayeed here creates a look dominated by blacks and reds. Some of Sayeed's effects are overdone, even hammy, as when his overlighting of an interrogation room threatens to turn the Q&A into a close encounter of the third kind, but he does achieve an overall evocation of night lurching into bleary dawn, a perfect visual rendering of the world of "clockers," those kids so hungry for money and status that they deal drugs round the clock in defiance of law and exhaustion and even the need to go to the bathroom.

There are excellent sequences, written by Price with an ear attuned to the language of the street but not infatuated with argot. When detectives examine a recently dispatched drug dealer's corpse, their jaded ribaldry does more to portray the obscenity of violent death than any slickly staged murder scene could. Drug boss Delroy Lindo, referring to his number-one assistant, Strike, as his "sword and staff," makes you hear the voices of the good Baptist folks who were this monster's ancestors and whose Bible language still permeates his gangster talk, and when you see twelve-year-old boys with their headphones plugged into "gangsta rap" outside the boss's headquarters while awaiting his orders and observe how they strut in place to the beat of the music, you get a good idea of how style ushers in violence; song teaches strut; strut bolsters attitude; attitude armors kids for violence.

I'll deal with Mekhi Phifer in the lead role of Strike in a moment. The rest of the cast is impeccable. Delroy Lindo was menacing enough as a crime lord in Malcolm X, but here a coating of paternal benevolence makes him even more frightening. Isaiah Washington as the self-accused brother convincingly embodies decency frayed by frustration. To say that Harvey Keitel plays a furious, foul-mouthed but compassionate cop nearly obviates any praise of his performance. Keitel owns this territory and he struts around in it like a prize bantam.

The superb jazz composer Terence Blanchard has graced the soundtrack with gorgeously melancholic music, though there is a bit too much of it. When Lee needs a more insolent sound, he switches to rap and cuts his images to that very different beat. And the editing is notable. It's always precise, but what's especially compelling is the way Lee often snips off a scene a few seconds before a routine director would, then jumps us into the next sequence just a bit past its conventional starting point. These slight elisions jolted me alert whenever I felt my attention wavering.

But why was my attention wavering so often during Clockers?

The answer startles me even as I give it. The film isn't very dramatic. Eventful, yes. Violent, certainly. Beatings, shootings, interrogations, threats, recriminations abound. But real drama--as long as we're not speaking of melodrama or farce--isn't defined by external action. Drama is the ride to revelation, crystallization, epiphany taken by one or more protagonists. In My Dinner with Andre', Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory sit at a restaurant table, talk, eat. Nothing else. Yet, because you feel how the diners affect each other, how their emotions are shifting, something dramatic transpires.

There's no such inner movement within Clockers's well-orchestrated turbulence. The hero, Strike, learns at the beginning of the movie that his boss wouldn't mind having another drug dealer eliminated. Strike, eager to climb up the ladder of criminal success, plans the murder. But when it comes time to kill, the director skips into the next scene. The rival dealer is murdered, all right, but by whom? Does the perpetual look of anguish on Strike's face signal remorse? an innocent man's bewilderment at being accused? fear that his brother really did the crime? nausea at his own moral corruption? or a mixture of all the above? It's impossible to tell (before the conclusion) because Spike Lee gives us no access to Strike's mind. The filmmaker has endowed his protagonist with the opacity of one of the suspects in a detective story, even though Clockers isn't a detective story but a character study taking place in a criminal milieu. It's as if Dostoevski had left the murder scene out of Crime and Punishment and then teased us throughout the book with the iffiness of Raskolnikov's guilt. If Clockers were a detective story, then Keitel's detective would be its true protagonist and we would puzzle out the crime's solution from his point-of-view. But, no, Strike is the real protagonist, and he is nothing but an anguished blank.

Poor Mekhi Phifer! Far from coaxing a performance out of this novice, Lee uses him as a punching bag. Probably because the director wants to warn kids about the misery of a drug dealer's life, he isn't content with portraying the hero's spiritual anguish but has him pummeled repeatedly by a neighborhood cop, pistol-whipped by his boss, roughed up by police drug squads, socked by kids in the neighborhood, jerked about physically and intellectually by Keitel, and even briefly slapped around by an understandably outraged neighborhood mom. Strike should have been called Struck.

Because Lee is great at limning the ghetto environment, we see the cause of Strike's pain all around him. But that's not the same as being taken inside the pain. For Lee--and therefore for us--the mind of this "clocker" seems terra incognita. No matter how stirring, no matter how laced with Spike Lee's rough poetry, sociology is not drama.