Though I’m not in the habit of review relatively recent and well-known movies (that reason is articulated here), Ben Affleck’s directorial debut in Gone Baby Gone was so unexpected that I couldn’t ignore it. I, like the vast majority of people following along, have at times dismissed Mr. Affleck as a talentless hack who got lucky and didn’t deserve his fame. If Gone Baby Gone accomplished nothing else, it put such thoughts to rest in my mind.

Gone Baby Gone is about ugly things, the seedy underbelly of crime and criminality that so many people and films seem drawn to. But what exists in it is something deeper and more textured not only than I expected, but than I thought a crime movie could be.

Where it’s different than other crime movies is this: rather than giving us a clear resolution of justice or injustice triumphant, it asks baldly what justice means? Is it better, the film asks, for a good outcome that comes through unsavory means or a unsavory outcome that comes through righteous means?

And I’d have to argue, honestly, that neither Mystic River nor The Departed–both set in Boston and dealing with a similarly seedy underbelly–was so adept at raising and dealing with such important philosophical issues. Then, perhaps, they weren’t blessed with the skeptical part of my brain constantly asking if or when Mr. Affleck would make an obvious mistake.

The fundamentals of this whole conflict are hard to illuminate without exposing too much, so I’ll do my best to give you the beginning of the plot and leave aside the ending. Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) is a native of the depressed Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. With his girlfriend, played by Michelle Monaghan, he’s hired to tackle a missing child case. His participation is neither invited nor welcomed by the police, who seem convinced that they knows better how to tackle the case than this renegade private investigator.

But Mr. Kenzie knows his neighborhood and it’s characters better than the police, and he rubs his liaisons the wrong way on that point. Here, I must stop myself from elaborating the rest of the twisting and intricate plot.

I should also offer the warning that I’m a sucker for poetic lines. And the films beginning, a thesis statement of sorts, had me from the first beat. It’s contents:

I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have. When your job is to find people who are missing, it helps to know where they started. I find the people who started in the cracks and then fell through. This city can be hard. When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. “You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.”

Whether you respect or loathe Mr. Affleck, I must strongly recommend that you make sure to give his directorial debut a try. It’s not an easy or a uplifting film. It’s a questioning one, but these are worthy questions and asked by a well-executed story.