“Mystic River” owes much of its gripping menace to Sean Penn’s livewire performance. He’s at his best in roles demanding searing, self-tormenting, hyper-masculine intensity. A fitting lead, then, for Clint Eastwood’s bracing study of masculinity—revenge as gender inheritance. The theme of the movie is etched into the sidewalk of the neighborhood. Sean and Jimmy scratch their names into the wet cement, but Danny’s is cut short after only the first two letters, a permanent epitaph for his stolen youth.

Easy enough to spot the meaning in that: Danny’s life is cut-off, incomplete. ‘Da’ is also an incomplete form of the word ‘dad’, a form often used in Irish slang and therefore not out of place in the boys’ working-class Boston neighborhood. This is the second, more significant reading of the half-name in the cement, because the central source of pain and violence in “Mystic River” is a missing father. In its inescapable cycle of grudges and retribution there is a strong sense of the Old Testament “sins of the fathers”, in its turns of fate the bitter irony of Greek tragedy. The crime is perpetrated by a fatherless character, and in a larger sense for all the characters the missing father is God.

Eastwood never really underscores that existential interpretation of the movie’s crimes, but there is certainly a spiritual heaviness to the irremediable grimness to the film. The end takes an even darker turn when Annabeth, Jimmy’s wife, ignores her husband’s damning revelation and tells him that he is their infallible ruler. “You could be king of this town,” she says, a Lady Macbeth after the fact. Uncoincidentally, a parade honoring the American Revolution is happening outside their door, forming the backdrop for the film’s finale.

Hardly subtle, but so much the better. Laura’s chilling speech to Jimmy, given alongside the parade, turns our attention to society as a whole. The crimes which she refuses to see as crimes suddenly appear to be not anomalies but rigidly systematic, part of the national fabric, part of our patriarchy. The America that Eastwood points toward is a nation that wants to back its king in filial devotion, questions of right or wrong be damned. Eastwood is too cagey to come out and say that, but “Mystic River” affords that reading, and it adds a subtext to the film that pleases in its shrewd appraisal of current national affairs.

As a crime mystery, the movie has the kind of pleasures audiences have come to expect from TV procedurals like “Law & Order”. A crime is committed, an investigation follows many interlocking paths, and the solution is unexpected. If there is one flaw, however, it’s that the solution is unexpected because it is not given adequate coverage by Brian Helgeland’s otherwise tight script. On bare facts alone the ending of the film is almost impossible to guess (on the other hand, if one projects the patterns of behavior of the principle characters on to the minor players, the answer is easy to guess). Armchair sleuths will be right to grumble.

But this isn’t much of a problem. The twist is beside the point.  Speaking of (or to?) his slain daughter, Jimmy says that he contributed in some way to her death, but he doesn’t know how. The solution to the mystery, when it comes, seems more like a footnote, but it delivers all the more punch because the last third of the movie is spent in utter dread in the expectation that we will find out that Jimmy was right. Eastwood is far more concerned with strong characters. The murder mystery gathers details that are merely symptoms of the characters’ pathologies.

Everything hinges on Jimmy, and Penn has the broad shoulders to carry the film. It’s one of his finest performances, brutal and regal all at once. Balanced against Jimmy’s tormented king is Sean, a man who has come from the same place as Jimmy but has made rather different choices. The underrated Kevin Bacon brings out the sturdiness in the character, a man who doggedly sticks to a doctrine of patience, and who learns, as his double Jimmy does not, to fall back on simple communication when everything else fails. His pregnant wife has left him, and as quickly as Jimmy reacts to his hardships, Sean waits with troubled but firm patience, hoping a little light will break through eventually. He is rewarded, but only when he finally tells his wife what needs to be said. A direct apology wins him his wife and daughter back.

Danny’s outpouring of resentment at the riverside comes too late, though. Played as a shambling ghost of a man by Tim Robbins, his last speech is arresting because in his lie about Katie’s murder he is also ventilating his angriest, longest-held resentments. Again: character trumps plot. Despite numerous opportunities to communicate openly with Jimmy over the years since his abduction, he has waited too long. His torrent of honesty doesn’t restore their friendship, it seals his fate.

“Mystic River”’s strength is that this thematic strand is masterfully woven together by the convincing performances of the entire cast, not just the principals. The whole cast serves up a slew of memorable performances. The story is driven by conversations, its mystery deepened in some places by characters who say nothing, in others by those who lie outright. The interplay is fascinating. Eastwood has a minimalist’s ear for the missing words, the blank spots, in these exchanges (a quality honed in his earliest, heavily laconic acting roles like The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry). In the film what’s done is terrible, what’s said is disturbing, but it’s what is not said that becomes so burdensome that it crushes the neighborhood.

At the parade, Sean points his finger at Jimmy and pulls an imaginary trigger. Jimmy opens his arms as if to say “come and get me”. True to the film’s style, this final, wordless exchange is more honest and direct than any preceding it. With a deft hand on the camera, Eastwood then lets us drift to the rest of the parade where, sitting unnoticed atop a float, we pick out the heir of the story’s violence, Danny’s son Michael, waiting in the wings as these men act out their tragedy, perhaps fated to repeat their sins and their suffering, perhaps fated to become yet another orphan of silence.