WHERE THERE'S SMOKE : Michael Mann's 'The Insider'.

Here's a scenario for you. A patriotic American discovers that a mighty and paranoid superpower is trying to undermine the health of this country, even to the point of turning many of us into addicts. But our hero also discovers that there is a weak link in the superpower's central bureaucracy, someone who, out of basic human decency, is willing to be a "mole" and release his employer's plan to the media. Political expediency suspends the revelation and puts the mole's existence in peril. But our hero finally gets the news out and rescues both the mole and the American people. The superpower still exists to do mischief in the future but at least it has been stymied.

No, this is not the latest James Bond thriller. It's a true story that you may already know if you've watched "60 Minutes" in the last few years, and it's now been dramatized and slightly fictionalized in Michael Mann's The Insider. The pernicious superpower isn't Russia or China or Iran; it's Brown & Williamson, an American corporation that makes cigarettes and may have added a chemical substance to its product to make nicotine more addictive. The mole is Jeffrey Wigand, a scientific researcher and vice- president of B&W who was fired for criticizing the additive and who, infuriated by the secrecy agreements he was forced to sign before departing, becomes a whistle blower. And our hero is the "60 Minutes" producer, Lowell Bergman, who first solicits Wigand's apostasy and then rescues his information from limbo when corporation politics (CBS's fear of a lawsuit) leads "60 Minutes" to emasculate Wigand's crucial interview with Mike Wallace.

The Insider fits snugly enough into the category of journalistic thriller- expose but, as I tried to suggest above, it's also something of an espionage drama, an industrial espionage thriller with agents of CBS (Bergman, Wallace) pitted against agents of B&W (corporate lawyers and, if we are to believe Wigand, anonymous thugs). Not the least frisson of this always compelling movie is the way it plays on the fears of even those of us willing to give two cheers for capitalism that an American business eliciting money from customers won't hesitate to kill some of those same customers to make a bigger profit. When John le Carre, after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, suggested that the industrial espionage novel might succeed the cold-war thriller genre, I thought this could be a hazardous development since it might entail the loss of moral stakes. In a tale pitting two corporations against each other with only profit at risk, what reader or viewer would care about the outcome? To my delight, The Insider brushes my trepidation aside.

What's interesting aesthetically about The Insider is the way it progresses from dimly lighted, claustrophobic, almost Kafkaesque terror to open-air, furiously paced muckraking drama. Wigand is the real protagonist of the first two-thirds, and the texture of the film echoes his fearfulness with scenes that are shadowy, coiled, and conspiratorial. B&W's CEO (played with oozing malice by Michael Gambon) is photographed by Dante Spinotti as a sort of Beria ensconced in a building of shadowy corridors patrolled by security guards who look like the worst thugs ever trained by the KGB. Just let Wigand work on his golf at a driving range and a sinister figure materializes at the adjacent tee, his every perfect shot a mockery of Wigand's nervous flubs. Threats appear on the scientist's e-mail; a bullet is placed in his mailbox. Thus, The Insider is tapping into one of the perdurable masochistic pleasures of the traditional spy thriller: We are drenched in a paranoia that may be justified. Furthermore, paranoia isn't just an atmospheric side effect here, but the movie's incitement, its wellspring. If Brown & Williamson hadn't been so paranoid about a "man who knew too much," they wouldn't have (reputedly) threatened him. And when Bergman first approaches Wigand to do a perfectly innocuous technical task for CBS, the scientist's paranoid response alerts the TV producer that this man is a potential mole.

Once the interview is emasculated by CBS and Wigand's life goes into limbo, so does his status as a character, because a character who can no longer affect the central action of a drama is no longer truly dramatic. And so Lowell Bergman takes over the movie and, as he calls up newspaper editors to report the shame of CBS's intimidation, the movie takes on his qualities: extroversion, righteous fury, fearlessness. The keynote image is of Al Pacino as Bergman, a sleepless tiger with a cordless phone, pacing back and forth on the beach in back of his house, the ocean roaring behind him, the world of media at his ear, exhortation and petition on his lips. Here is the town crier of the millennium (I swear this is the first and last time I use the M word) taking the drama from darkness to light, from concealment to revelation, from the murk of corporate secrecy to the vibrancy of humane muckraking.

The two lead actors are superb, yet what a difference in the results. Al Pacino, usually an actor with a few too many flourishes for my taste, plays Bergman with immense energy but no frills. By the movie's conclusion, he has convinced us that this journalist is a man who can know himself only through strenuous action, and that we have had a rare occasion to know him well because we have seen him operate at the top of his form.

Russell Crowe as Wigand isn't just Pacino's equal; he actually tops the excellent work he did in L.A. Confidential. Yet the result frustrated me because, given the story's limits, we can't really know Jeffrey Wigand. Has an actor ever given so much more information than his script? (I'm not faulting the writing of Mann and Eric Roth. Their aim was to reveal Wigand's part in a scandal, not to plumb the depths of his character.) Crowe reveals Wigand's pride in his scientific ability, but he can't show why it was wasted on behalf of cigarettes. Just for money? The actor perfectly captures the man's depleted love for his wife but can't explain when or why the marriage went sour. And so forth. Wigand, on screen at least, is a man who lives behind a mask of stoicism even when he's quivering inside with rage. Crowe's brilliance is to indicate all sorts of movement under that mask, yet we yearn to peek behind it.

Eric Roth's writing confidently taps into the boardroom, swivel-chair machismo of executives and celebrity broadcasters as in the moment when Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) states that going through with the Wigand story might force him to "spend my final days wandering in the wilds of PBS." (Daniel Schorr will get a chuckle out of that one.)

Michael Mann's direction holds the wide-ranging story together, giving it the proper measures of panoramic sweep and microscopic intensity, though I wish he had reined in a pretentious musical score that seems to set this entirely American story somewhere in the Middle East.

The tale told is mostly true but is the movie fair? Fair to cigarette manufacturers? Pu-leeze! Fair to Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt (producer of "60 Minutes"), who have complained that they never capitulated to CBS's fears? On this point I plead ignorance, but I must say that Christopher Plummer, a supreme stage actor who at last has a screen role he can sink his thespian incisors into, makes Wallace a gleaming, magnetic prima donna, one whom the audience never sneers at but comes to regard as a lovable monster, almost a nonlethal version of Hannibal Lechter. There are worse ways to be slandered.