25th Hour is a special kind of movie, the kind that only comes around once every very long while; the kind that is original and exciting in plot, script, and execution. With full-frontal honesty in a film set in post-9/11 New York, director Spike Lee successfully shoulders the difficult task of blending fiction with reality in a city riddled with dreams and despair.

And Lee doesn’t make the viewing easy on his audience, choosing a protagonist of dubious character; a drug dealer whose private morality can only be viewed in the context of his profession’s grand disservice to the public. The 25th Hour is harsh, gritty, and purposefully choppy— it is realism compounded with a slight tinge of philosophy.

What makes this difficult combination such a resounding achievement is perhaps the surprising freshness of the film’s premise: drug dealer Montgomery Brogan’s (Edward Norton) last day before he rides away from his old life into the unwelcoming iron embrace of six years in a prison cell.

Subsequent to his arrest and sentencing, Brogan is a man beset by unfounded suspicions and overwhelming fear for the jail time that lies ahead. The nagging question of who ratted him out overshadows his entire existence, to the point where he cannot shake the idea that his girlfriend, Naturelle Rivera (Rosario Dawson) is the culprit.

Thus, Monty’s day becomes more than a man’s last twenty-four hours of freedom; it becomes a time to uncover the truth and to say farewell to those who have been loyal and well-loved. Two old-time friends, sleazy stock broker Francis (Barry Pepper) and straight-edge English teacher Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), along with Monty's alcoholic father (Brian Cox), are the only ones who fall into that slim category.

Francis is an attractive, hard-nosed man of shallow relationships, of pragmatism and cynicism, whose view of the world understands that after six years in jail, his old friend Monty will be nothing more than a mere figment of the past. Jakob, in contrasting, sanguine optimism, believes that there is hope; that a man can weather the storm and survive as his old self.

Yet even Jakob’s tightly held morality begins to collapse as the film progresses, with his semi-obsessive crush on his cute, flaky student Mary (Anna Paquin) developing and deepening as the story progresses. After-hours in the club of Monty’s last party, Jakob begins to see and feel a little of the pervading hopelessness of twin towers survivors, of sentenced criminals, of men whose money never bought them happiness.

Indeed, virtue runs very thin in 25th Hour, with only brief flashbacks and a failing love story to cling to for inspiration and the continuing belief that life is good. In one unforgettably intense, unusual scene, Monty rails at New York in a mirror, cussing every race, every group in a barrage of stereotypes and biased generalizations before finally realizing his anger can only be directed at himself, the man who “had it all" and threw it away.

And while Monty is deciding whether to accept prison, or to run, whether to trust his girl or the paradigm “honor among thieves", Lee, in his brilliance, forces the audience to decide as well. For in this twisted mass of confused morals and fading relationships, Lee brings the film home with critical commentary on 9/11, on the ethics of ordinary people’s lives, and on the little decisions that determine our basic fates.

25th Hour (134 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for strong language and some violence.