Mean Streets, the most original American movie of the year, doesn't just explode—it erupts with volcanic force. It is a shocking, jolting, even pulverizing view of "Desolation Row," the claustrophobic, small-time petty Mafia world that is Martin Scorsese's vision of New York's Little Italy. In this semi-feudal empire, the random and the ritual, sacred and profane, and sane and insane are in perpetual conflict—and Scorsese shows us the turmoil bubbling beneath the society's surfaces just as he knows it, without a trace of Hollywood glamorizing, demystifying Italian criminal life even as he personalizes it….

Scorsese integrates realism, stylized elements, symbolism, surrealism and other nonlinear modes of exposition as part of a continuing struggle to relate method to meaning.

The film is suffused with an extraordinary realism. Scorsese's camera moves around like a tiger on the prowl, hand-held and lurking in forbidden places one moment, stationary, coolly observing the unexpected in the next. The often improvised, largely comic, always overlapping dialogue provides a perfect aural equivalent, while the acting virtually leaps off the screen….

Nearly every location contributes to the film's claustrophobic atmosphere. Scorsese shot the movie during the San Gennaro Festival so that the streets are crawling with people, imprisoning each character on his native turf. The incessant music …—rock in the bars and cars, Italian standards in the restaurants, street music as part of the festival—provides a continual and numbing din that generates its own form of claustrophobia.

The stylization naturally spills forth into a network of symbols that some may find heavy-handed but which I found exhilarating because each is distilled from the natural objects and appearances of the community. Scorsese brazenly contrasts church icons with street icons: the cross versus the gun, the sensuous surface of a church statue versus the sensuous surface of a black bar dancer bathed in rhinestones; Giovanni's pictures of the Kennedys and Mussolini resting alongside one of the Pope….

Scorsese's most difficult task was to find a way of representing Charlie's inner conflicts. He finally hit upon a combination of voice-over monologues and elaborate fire symbolism….

If fire is one side of Scorsese's explosive visuals, his physical and verbal depictions of violence provide another. The random fighting in Mean Streets breaks out without warning or explanation. We either learn the reason for it after the fact or not at all. And in almost every case Scorsese extends the action beyond existing conventions, so that he not only generates shock but anxiety….

Scorsese uses each technique to depict both the dynamics of community life and Charlie's isolation from them. During a dance to "Pledging My Love" (the ultimate rock & roll death song) he stays on Charlie's enigmatic face for as long as he stays on the fighting, until we can no longer avoid his sense of loneliness, confusion, guilt and pain. He is trapped by the camera as surely as he is by the streets….

Mean Streets is autobiographical without being sentimental or cynical. It penetrates so deeply into a particular way of life that it may alienate those for whom it is impossible to make the basic connections. But Scorsese has refused any compromises. He offers no explicit explanations, leaves the loose ends untied, and refuses to kill Charlie off at the end (it would have been too easy), so that we leave the theater not with a sense of catharsis, but with an unbearable anxiety about what can possibly become of him.

[If Scorsese had less faith in his audience he] … might have risked breaking up the realism of the soundtrack to offer a definitive clue to Mean Streets' meaning, by copping a line from Dylan's best music, "… to live outside the law you must be honest." To which [he] could have added, "It's all right Ma, it's life and life only." For if Mean Streets, a brilliant title, for a brilliant film, by a brilliant artist, means anything at all, it is most certainly that—and it is more than enough.