Clint Eastwood's outstanding “Mystic River” has already stirred up the kind of Oscar talk that's more than just buzz. It's easy to see why. The opaque Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns has become one of the cinema's foremost chroniclers of what it means to be a man. From the tight-lipped vigilante snarl of “Dirty Harry” to the obsolescent myth of the gunfighter in “Unforgiven,” Eastwood has traced the face of the American male with a terse honesty and a knowing heart. In “Mystic River,” he takes on essential matters such as fatherhood, responsibility to family and friends, and the cult of machismo. And how being a man in this country can sometimes mean losing part of what makes you human. Based on Dennis Lehane's best seller and astutely adapted by Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential”), “Mystic River” takes place in a blue-collar Boston neighborhood where family and community mean almost as much as the Red Sox. In a shattering prologue, we watch three 10-year-old best friends — Jimmy, Sean and Dave — fooling around together, playing street hockey and etching their names in wet cement. They're interrupted by two men in a car who insist Dave get in. He suffers sexual abuse, yet in that single afternoon, through no choice of their own, all their lives are irrevocably altered. Jumping to the present day, we meet them as adults. Though no longer close, they still have strong ties to the neighborhood. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con who now runs a corner grocery. He's got a stand-by-her-man wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney), and three kids, including a vibrant teenage daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum). Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective, has his professional life together, but his personal life is a shambles. His pregnant wife abandoned him months ago, and she now calls him periodically but never speaks. As for Dave (Tim Robbins), he never made it past that long-ago afternoon. A lumbering shell of a man, with haunted eyes and an unsteady manner, he scrapes out a living so he can support his meek, tentative wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), and their young son. Another senseless act of violence — in this case, a murder — puts the three in each other's lives again. Sean and his partner, Whitey (Laurence Fishburne, looking happy to be acting, not posturing) are assigned the case. Dave is an eventual suspect. Jimmy is a self-appointed avenging angel. Howling with grief, he's determined to find and punish the killer before the cops can. Justice outside the law is a familiar theme in Eastwood's career. But unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino, he doesn't make self-referential movies. “Mystic River” is, on a basic level, a murder mystery. But it's also about lives impacted by fate, about how the past can strangle the present. The movie doesn't show us the road not taken. It shows us the boys not taken — and the boy who was. Eastwood has handed Penn the role of a lifetime, and the actor scorches the screen with his anguish and angry vengefulness. It's the showiest work in the film and the performance most likely to garner award attention. Yet, in their different ways, Bacon and Robbins are just as good, if not better. Bacon's work is a marvel of containment and understatement; of the three, he most closely matches Eastwood's sparse, intelligent direction. As for Robbins, it may not be the role of his career, but it's certainly the performance. The actor drills into the soul of the inchoate mess that passes for Dave. He is, as one character says, “damaged goods.” Just how damaged is slowly revealed. The female roles aren't as prominent, but Eastwood knew what he was doing when he cast these two remarkable women. Harden makes Celeste a deeply insecure woman, uncertain of herself and of her husband. Conversely, Linney's Annabeth quietly unveils herself as the steely-eyed Lady Macbeth of South Boston. A look exchanged between the two women at a neighborhood parade says more than Penn's howls or even Robbins' stammering. Still, Shakespeare isn't the reference here; Greek tragedy is. The appearance of those men in the car all those years ago has the senseless capriciousness of the Greek gods, who routinely altered lives on a whim, without the slightest thought of cause and effect. Their actions on that grievous afternoon set events in motion, events that are still in motion decades later. And in “Mystic River's” grimy corner of the city, the gods have turned their backs.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE :The Atlanta Journal-Constitution