Can you make a film about revolution and say nothing about it? Can you do so beautifully? The sketch-animation opening of “American Gangster” tells the film’s story in 20 seconds: A wandering man defined only in chiaroscuro is transformed into an eagle; he flies briefly and returns to the earth. No context is given to the myth, and none is required. We are to watch, transfixed, a metamorphosis, but we are not to change ourselves. Perhaps if screenplay adaptor Steven Zaillain (“The Interpreter”) had found a director willing to stay true to this vision, “American Gangster,” a fictional crime epic centering on real-life ’70s heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, would not leave the viewer both satisfied and completely adrift. Truth is stranger than fiction, but the 2000 New York magazine article “The Return of Superfly,” which the film is based on, in every way seems made for the screen. The rise of a black man to the top of a Mafia-controlled heroin market, by buying direct from opium fields in Vietnam, is ripe for both human drama and social commentary. But in 2007 Hollywood, the story seems divorced from any relevance. The politics of the time are communicated primarily through a lazy device that feels complicit in, not critical of, American apathy: clips on Lucas’ television of Nixon propaganda on the war on Communism and drugs. “American Gangster” could have transcended its cut-and-dry tragedy if the film showed its lead, a commanding but act-by-numbers Denzel Washington (“Déjà Vu”), as a human being rather than a figure for the free market. In giving equal time to a paper-thin counterweight, honest Jersey cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, “3:10 to Yuma”), “American Gangster” reduces itself to black-and-white contrast. There are attempts to complicate the relationship, but each character’s paradox is relegated to dead-end soap opera subplots. The movie beats Roberts’ honest contrast to the crooked New York police into the viewer’s head, and the heavy-handed counter to this is a prolonged custody battle over his many infidelities. Lucas does not hesitate to kill a disloyal dealer in broad daylight, but buys his South Carolina mother a home in upstate New York. These are contradictions created for the sake of equalizing the players, but neither Lucas nor Roberts shows any gain or loss because of them. Director Ridley Scott (“The Kingdom”) attempts to restrain himself from the sweeping, fantastic worlds he created in “Alien” and “Blade Runner.” Unsure of how to depict a focused locale, he successfully grounds the images by taking stylistic cues from diverse influences. Scott’s homage melding of both blaxploitation and classic crime dramas gives a fresh look to each scene. Scott successfully combines the extreme muted close-up of “The Godfather,” the over-the-top costume and soundtrack of blaxploitation progenitor “Superfly,” and the action uses the gritty, shaky camera of the modern cops-and-robbers movie to visceral effect. Scott shows an uncanny eye for cinematic detail throughout, letting the camera lie on an overturned coffee cup on a bedspread, before a sudden burst of violence erupts outside. But Ridley Scott’s Harlem never feels like the Harlem of the actual Frank Lucas (the need for frequent scene-setting intertitles betrays this), nor does it feel his own. For a movie steeped in a flamboyant culture, what stands out most are the fur coats, not the characters. Homage to blaxploitation is carefully negated with a politically correct reworking of the unabashed showboat Lucas as the consummate American businessman: well-versed in the language of the elite, conservatively dressed and scrupulously loyal to his mother. The careful, largely bloodless violence feels similarly disconnected, as it reflects the lack of high stakes in the rest of the movie. Make no mistake: The screaming but fully on-the-rails pace of the movie rarely lets the viewer go, and the film is engrossing from start to finish. But the rigid track of Lucas’ rise and fall never so much as hits a pebble; “order,” Lucas’ mantra, never feels about to upend — on the streets, in the corrupt military and police stations or in Lucas’ psyche. The film’s failing is that unlike the “Godfather,” the “American Gangster” is an everyman that feels like no man at all. 3 stars out of 5