Johnny Depp delivers gripping performance in ‘Black Mass’

He’s back.

After a dismaying series of missteps (“Mortdecai”) and misfires (“Transcendence,” “The Lone Ranger”), Johnny Depp comes roaring back to acting excellence in “Black Mass.”

Actually, “roaring” misstates the nature of his return to the pantheon of Hollywood’s top talents. In the role of gangster Whitey Bulger, Depp does not roar. He speaks in low tones fraught with menace.

If great acting can be defined as the ability to disappear into a role, then Depp gives the greatest performance of his career as Bulger. His Bulger doesn’t sound like Depp. He doesn’t look like Depp, thanks to prosthetics and makeup that give him a sky-high forehead, accentuated by baldness and flaring side wings of slicked-back hair.

His smile is thin and without mirth. He’s stiletto slender, sheathed in a black leather jacket, eyes often obscured by big aviator shades. But it’s when the shades are removed that the full, fearsome nature of his performance comes through. He stares out at the world with a basilisk’s glare. To look into those eyes is to see death.

Depp’s Bulger is a psychopath, a stone-cold killer who often doesn’t delegate the dirty work, but is literally hands-on: garroting, choking, throttling those who cross him or whom he otherwise perceives as a threat.

There are shootings too. Plenty of those. Old-style executions. There are none of the displays of massive firepower common in movies today. Rather, revolver shots at close range are the preferred method of dispatching rivals and rats.

The rats are informants, killed without compunction. Which is ironic, because Bulger himself is an informant, a deep-cover snitch for the FBI. Directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) from a script credited to Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, “Black Mass” is based on a true-crime account of the same title by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. It tells the sordid story of how Bulger is recruited by an agent named John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) who is a boyhood friend from the tight-knit Irish-American community of South Boston where they both grew up. Connolly seeks to use Bulger to bring down the Mafia, rivals to Bulger’s Irish gangsters who specialize in extortion and drug dealing. With Connolly’s promise of immunity from prosecution in exchange for information to be used to bust mafiosi, Bulger is essentially given carte blanche to build a criminal empire. In the process, Connolly is thoroughly corrupted and the FBI by extension is tainted as well.

This is a movie rife with close-ups of the beefy faces of hard-eyed hard guys threatening, betraying and ruminating on dirty deeds they’ve done. Heavy emphasis is placed on the supposedly unbreakable South Boston bond that binds Connolly and Bulger, which leads Connolly very badly astray.

Edgerton’s portrayal of Connolly is less than persuasive, too wishy-washy somehow. But many of the secondary characters — stolid hit men, jittery stool pigeons and angry FBI types — are persuasively portrayed. (Kevin Bacon as an FBI supervisor is particularly effective).

The filmmakers’ decision to essentially end the picture at the moment Bulger flees prosecution gives it a rushed feeling as it skims over his years on the run and his capture and conviction in 2013 of 11 murders.

Despite its flaws, it’s Depp who holds the whole thing together. His Bulger is thoroughly repellent and unnaturally fascinating.

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 6:10 PM with the headline "Johnny Depp delivers gripping performance in ‘Black Mass’."