Following up the brilliantBlue Valentine,Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines is an equally challenging film that’s not without its faults but the ambitious scope and structural risks allow it to tackle themes of reverberation and legacy that rarely come together so effectively.

In crafting a spider web of stories that don’t orbit around noxious serendipity, Cianfrance has made the anti-Crash. He’s directed a film that actually justifies its revolving door of narratives rather than using them as a crutch for poor screenwriting and in doing so explores the interconnectedness of two families destined to collide and the aftermath that follows.

The film opens on a quiet, young rebel named Luke, the always-winning Ryan Gosling, sporting the ever-popular bleeding-dagger-face-tattoo, cloaked in a red leather jacket and zipping hither and thither on his beloved dirt bike. Luke is a man living in the cacophony of his life decisions – a rootless, wandering soul who abruptly discovers that he has a son with one time lover Romina, Eva Mendes. When Luke decides he wants to help raise the child, he realizes the meagerness of funds accrued from riding while a stunt bike in a sphere cage. However impressive his gravity-defying, harmonious loops may be, they aren’t quite enough to win over the mother of his child and as a result, turns to robbing banks with lowlife buddy Robin, in a great little turn by Ben Mendelsohn.

Even when Luke is scraping bottom and cawing at fearful tellers and bank patrons, he never seems like a bad guy; a lost soul, surely; a desperado at wit’s end, yes; but never that cold-eyed criminal these characters are so often reduced to. The fleshed out dimensionality of Luke is due in large part to the casting of Gosling who adds a dollop of sincerity and humanity to even his tough guy roles.

As Luke’s story accelerates, we met Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a law-school-grad-turned-rookie-cop whose heart is in the right place. This is a man of justice with a ideological stance and a vendetta against corruption. Cooper scores here again and offers a complex and thoughtful performance offering some Oscar worthy soundbites that are sure to turn heads.

The natural dissonance so craftily built here is that both Luke and Avery are likeable individuals doing the best they can in the circumstances of their lives so it’s hard to take sides. Each suffer their own character flaws; their personal follies that both drive them and define them. It just so happens that these traits happen to put them on a collision course with each other. What begins when they finally do crash is an inter-generational battle between naturally polar forces. Order clashes with anarchy and the resulting push and pull becomes characterizing moments in these people’s lives.

It’s the age-old tale of the lawman and the criminal but the film steps outside of these constraints when it shifts the narrative to their now-aged children: AJ Cross (Emory Cohen) and Luke’s offspring Jason (Dane DeHaan) – exploring how the conflict between their father’s spans more than just their generation. As Jason embodies the somber, gentle persona of his father, AJ is a drug-addled bully – the antithesis of his father’s principles. Here we question the power of heredity and genetics with regards to their respective upbringing, what and who is ultimately responsible for who these young men will become. It’s a battleground for the war between nature and nurture to unfold.

However sweeping the tale becomes, in these stark transitions between narratives, Cianfrance loses the sense of pounding momentum he has worked so hard to build in the first place and though this ultimately pays off in the end, it seems like there could have been a way to incorporate these rivaling tales without feeling like three conflicting movies compete for the biggest piece of the pie.

But what ultimately makes The Place Beyond the Pines such a successful meditation on legacy is Cianfrance’s refusal to take sides. There’s clearly a well-defined legal good and evil but outside the stringent reach of the law, life isn’t so black and white. Bad things happen to good people and money is stolen by cops and criminals alike. Goodness comes not from what we do but how we do it and what we do it for. As the wheels spin round, we wonder if we’re helpless to change the things set in motion for ourselves.

While the scope here offers a commanding view of the nature of reverberations, the mood is repeatedly dour and at times painstakingly hard to watch. This glum tone takes command and when paired with the shadowy cinematography by Sean Bobbitt (Shame, Hunger), things often seem hopeless. But it is only at our lowest point that we are able to rise up and although the conclusion is up to interpretation, it’s impossible to deny the beauty of everything coming full circle.

Even though the film wallows in a lot of muck, The Place Beyond the Pines charters an ambitious course which few successful others can rival in terms of breadth. Each and every performance on display is top-notch and even though it might not be the type of breezy, uplifting cinema most audiences pine for (see what I did there?), it will be sure to leave you thinking minutes, hours and days later.