Michael Mann is a director who gets things right a lot of the time. He gets police tactics. He gets criminals. He understands the night, and films it better than anyone else alive. He is a stickler for visual detail, and his films (Heat, The Insider, Collateral, etc.) reflect an obsession with showing things how they are, and letting the story emerge from the scene. Public Enemies carries on in this vein; it is visually arresting, historically fascinating, and seems utterly real. Unfortunately that doesn’t quite make it a masterpiece.

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Depression-era Public Enemy No. 1, in a performance that seems relatively understated, at least in comparison to the Jack Sparrow-level performances we’ve been seeing from him lately. The film begins with Dillinger leading a jailbreak and setting his crew in motion; from the start, Mann trains his digital camera on the details; the operational security of the group as they take themselves out of prison, and the no-nonsense response as one of them breaks protocol. This is a gang, and a movie, that means business. Soon, an awkward and ambitious J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) places Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) at the head of the search for Dillinger. Bale, a clenched-jaw sort, plays Purvis well as a machine, a Terminator if you will, in search of Dillinger. Purvis soon enlists hardened Texas Rangers in the hunt for Public Enemy No.1 (the Rangers and their technique is the highlight of the film), and Public Enemies starts to track a predictable course as Dillinger starts to run out of friends.

Mann’s digital filmwork stays tight to the characters, showing their pores and their up-close reactions as Dillinger holds up bank after bank, stopping only to romance young Billie Frechette, played somewhat distantly by Marion Cotillard. The movie only pauses briefly on these characters, before zooming out distantly again to consider the FBI’s neophyte wiretapping techniques (literally tapping into the wires of a phone operator room) and the pioneering of modern crimefighting approaches. Mann makes larger intimations as to the dark side of unrestrained law enforcement, as suspects are deported, intimidated, and beaten under harsh questioning (which some might call enhanced interrogation). As in Heat and his other movies, the bad guys and good guys begin to resemble each other….

…if only fleetingly. The FBI has no version of Baby Face Nelson, gleefully machine gunning his way aboard the sideboard of a Ford. But as in Heat, the calm and controlled methodologies of the criminals begin to cave in and collapse as the police begin to tighten their nets; Depp shows with subtlety Dillinger’s realization that his reign is drawing to a close, as he is forced to collaborate with former traitors and with the monstrous Nelson.

Unfortunately, the history and the scope of Public Enemies are ultimately more interesting than the movie itself. The action scenes, while hyper-realistic, are frequently uninteresting, and the plot at times lags and Dillinger finds himself holed up with no place to go. While that’s great history, it’s not the most thrilling thing to watch on a movie screen. At the same time, the romance largely fall flat; Cotillard, so affecting in La Vie En Rose, instead finds herself in a largely emotionless role, while Depp seems at times more interested in playing the historical person of Dillinger than a dramatic character. It doesn’t help that romance is not Mann’s strong suit, and has never been – he makes movies about crime. Other drawbacks – the spoken audio is often mumbled or muffled, compared to the whip-crack sounds of the machine guns, and the contrast between night and sudden crispness of the camera gives a modern verite style that seems a bit at odds with the period being depicted.

So, the characters aren’t fully formed, and it’s a largely emotionless film. You could do worse. The portrayals seem real, the film is complex and seems accurate, and it’s an enthralling period of American history. As such, Public Enemies is a precise, well-executed film that makes Dillinger’s history real and alive.