Michaël Roskam’s The Drop (rated R), a gritty crime drama set in a Brooklyn that time forgot, features the last onscreen performance from the late James Gandolfini, an actor who never got the credit – or the diverse role choices – he may have been due. In last year’s Enough Said the actor was allowed one last time to stretch outside of our expectations, playing an ordinary guy with ordinary flaws in a highly relatable mature romance. Compared to that project, this swan song is Gandolfini comfort food: He glowers, he barks, he flirts with danger.

The entire film is that way, really. Roskam seems to be channeling Sidney Lumet with this tale of low-level hoods and barely connected tough guys who circle each other with wary unease in this hardscrabble borough neighborhood on a cold few weeks after Christmas. The action centers around Cousin Marv’s, a bar once owned by its namesake (Gandolfini) before he ran afoul of a small but lethal gang of Chechen mobsters. Now they own it and Marv just runs things, not without bitterness at his downturned luck. Occasionally the hoods will swing in for a free drink and a warning that business is coming their way: Every so often the bar is used as an illegal money drop, making Cousin Marv’s a temporary nexus of high tension.

Marv isn’t alone behind the bar. With him most nights is Bob (Tom Hardy), a quiet type whose deferential tone and simple demeanor mark him as the Lennie to Marv’s George. The movie belongs to Bob more than Marv, and we follow the amiable bartender as he moves easily around town; one night he finds an adorable pit bull puppy beaten nearly to death and left in a garbage can, a discovery that connects him to the good-natured Nadia (Noomi Rapace) and, soon enough, to less favorable people.

The way Roskam keeps coming back to that dog, I was expecting something bad to happen to the puppy; this is that kind of movie, in which man’s inhumanity to man could easily be shown spilling over into the animal kingdom. But – spoiler alert – the dog turns out fine in the end. Instead, violence is meted out in other directions, as the prelude to an inevitable evening of betrayal and not-well-executed master plans.

The Drop’s screenplay is the first ever written by Dennis Lehane, the crime novelist normally known for gritty tales around Boston (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River). This story feels like a Lehane book: Its characters have scars, both literal and metaphorical, and the miasma of old crimes linger over the neighborhood like grease molecules suspended in the air around a deep-fryer in the bar’s kitchen. Everybody has history here – from Nadia’s connection to a local tough guy (Matthias Schoenaerts) to whatever it was that made Bob the way he is now.

I wish this film had supported its central story as well as it does its characters and mood; sadly, the Why behind much of what happens in The Drop is not up to par, relative to the Who and the Where. Hardy’s Bob is magnetic but a cipher, a character we want to get to know better but who remains frustratingly out of reach. Schoenaerts, so well used in Roskam’s Bullhead and in last year’s Rust and Bone, isn’t given much to do besides project menace. And then there’s Gandolfini, an old pro at this sort of thing; in his hands Marv is able to transcend stereotype and come alive, even when he’s just on the periphery of a scene. It’s a terrific performance that deserves better than this good-not-great film. Sadly, we’ll never get to see him try again.

(IMAGE: James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy in The Drop. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.)