It could have been anybody, any New Yorker. Any one of 10 million people living for the city. But in the sweltering summer of 1977, only David Berkowitz snapped completely. He killed almost a dozen people that summer, and while he was a murderous fact for some, Berkowitz remained a disembodied figment of a city's paranoia. That's the brutally beautiful refraction Spike Lee makes of the Berkowitz murders in "Summer of Sam," his harrowing, vivid and slow-burning entry in an urban diary that finds Lee operating under a fascinating restraint.

Jimmy Breslin - the outspoken then-columnist for the New York Daily News to whom Berkowitz sent letters detailing his mental state - provides the preamble and the afterword in which he simultaneously curses New York and claims it. Lee tries to reflect that ambivalence toward the city which, until now, he mostly sensualized. "Summer of Sam"" impressionistically enacts a livid, underworldly assortment of boroughs pulsing with the heat of iniquity and desperation. Ellen Kuras has replaced Lee's regular cinematographer, Malik Hassan-Sayeed, who's turned to directing hip-hop videos, and she gives this film similar vibrant, humid textures that speak more to its characters' oncoming rage than the mugginess outside.

"Sam" begins with murders six and seven, shot with the grisly anonymity of horror film; the porky Berkowitz ( "The Practice's" Michael Badalucco) lurking behind bushes, power-walking up to car windows and saluting them with his .44. There's a fevered nightmarishness in the depiction of death here, and its sped-up immediacy catches you off guard. The script, co-written by

"Sopranos" actor Michael Imperioli and Victor Colicchio - who did touch-ups with Lee - distills the confusion, fear and curiosity stirred by the killer, who called himself the Son of Sam, down to a single Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx, specifically two of its residents, childhood best friends Vinnie and Ritchie (fierce John Leguizamo and Adrien Brody), whose relationship is overlaid with Jesus-Judas betrayal.

Vinnie's a philandering hairdresser whose Catholicism prevents him from having adventurous, satisfying sex with his eager-to-please wife (an uncorked Mira Sorvino). He's also haunted by the suspicion that the .44-caliber killer - as the press dubbed Berkowitz - got a look at him while he was trysting with another woman one night. Ritchie left the Bronx for the Village (the ideal Spike Lee hinterland) and returns reborn as some punked-out Sex Pistols hatchling, his gangly body and hangdog face looking as though it literally just poked through an egg.

The first time in years his other childhood buddies see Ritchie, he's sporting a Union Jack T-shirt and faux British accent. They think he's a weirdo because he listens to X and goes to CBGBs. But as it becomes clear that he's going to become the scapegoat for a community's rage, Lee identifies, vaguely, with Ritchie's

"otherized" status - or maybe Lee is simply moved by the tenderness, comfort and bravery of Brody's performance, which never allows you to believe that Ritchie thinks he's strange.

While the NYPD (represented here by Anthony LaPaglia and Roger Guenevere Smith) pounds the pavement for answers, milking corrupt connections such as Ben Gazzara's wise guy, the close-knit Bronx community comes unhinged and tries to catch the killer by itself. Its manhunt takes on a rabid despair as a tense neighborhood watch - suspicious of everyone from the funny-looking pizza-slinger to Yankees No. 44 Reggie Jackson - turns into a seething lynch mob of theatrical proportions with its eyes eventually set on Ritchie.

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy. His films are cinematic passion plays sometimes given to rambling - such is the case in

"Summer of Sam" on one or two occasions. But it climaxes almost biblically, avoiding the discursive commentary that fractured "Jungle Fever's" most allegorical moments, and draws its archetypes into the passion play that closes the film. By the time that unfolds, Lee has adjusted the film's momentum so often that, via the revolving use of different film stocks and Barry Alexander Brown's cleverly erratic editing, you begin to experience the woozy, mood-swinging of Leguizamo's coked-up, pill-popping Vinnie. When the film doesn't seem like it's on 'ludes, as it often does, it feels like it really wants to be - its senses heightened, a little capricious.

"Summer of Sam" also finds Lee perplexed for the first time about the heterogeneity of the city he's treated like a cauldron as opposed to a melting pot. He wanders into Greenwich Village and is as bewildered by what he finds there as he is dismayed by the Berkowitz murders. Lee is downright anthropological in his contemplative, unromantic assessment of the period and the film's Italian American cast. Everything here - from punk and Catholic dogma to disco and the blond wigs the Bronx women wear to protect themselves from the brunette-obsessed Berkowitz - is freakish or odd. Even when the TV news reporter Lee plays in a couple of cameos ventures to the director's own Bed-Stuy 'hood to get the "black perspective" on the murders, the film never leaves the confines of the television screen it's framed in.

Movie Review "Summer of Sam'

* CAST John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Esposito

* DIRECTOR Spike Lee

* WRITER Michael Imperioli, Victor Colicchio, Lee


* THEATERS UA Galaxy, Metreon, Kabuki, Century Plaza


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