One of the great, ambiguous pleasures of movies is that they allow us to indulge in illicit fantasies, and moralists who think something should be done about this might as well try to do something about the weather. If the hero is disreputable, as he is in Neil Jordan's new heist picture The Good Thief, starring Nick Nolte as an expatriate junkie, compulsive gambler, and big-time thief living on the French Riviera, the movie pretty much inevitably glamorizes his undesirable and even criminal behavior. This gives the audience a kick without a hangover and here it does something for Jordan as well: I can't remember a movie of his that hopped this fast.

In the opening passages the great cinematographer Chris Menges whizzes through the underworld locations where Nolte's Bob gambles, shoots up, and gets into fights. Like the recent Brazilian picture City of God about juvenile crime in Rio de Janeiro, you have to work to keep up with the information recorded on the fly, and it's graphically thrilling. Menges has the venerable movie skill of making the seedy look beautiful, and in this opening he does it in heated magic marker colors, complete with fumes. The world where Bob plays is peopled by recent immigrants, from North Africa and Eastern Europe, and the movie has a look appropriate to poor folks integrating into the bottom of a developed culture. The night spot scenes look toxically synthetic and when a Russian man plays electric guitar to a sound-sensitive laser machine emitting algae-green light, the very air seems to be freaking out. The purposely disjointed garishness of the post-Impressionist masterpieces we later see look soothingly neoclassical to our eyes by comparison.

Menges's fast shooting style is matched by the breathlessly edgy editing, which cuts between scenes on flash-frozen frames that almost make you lurch in your seat at the sudden arrest of the movie's propulsion. Likewise, Jordan directs the actors to speak much of their dialogue as rapid banter among familiars. Even Bob and Roger (Tchéky Karyo), the French cop who tails him, just knowing he's up to something, interact like a former vaudeville team, almost affectionate and practiced in the art of keeping one step ahead of each other. (Bob is the naturally deft partner, Roger the one who has to work at it.)

Of course, Nolte is playing a drug addict with a diminishing amount of future left, as he points out to Roger; his voice rumbles out of him as if the treble had been burned out of his sound system long ago; and at times he makes walking look like a miraculously controlled form of falling on your face; and so he's not a spry criminal figure. He's like the older Jean Gabin--a seasoned outcropping of rock. Not just monumental, like John Wayne, but expressively rugged. (Their characters know how to use their bulky mass to dominate without bluster.) But Nolte never seems left behind by the technical wizardry, and at the end, when he goes to the casino in Monte Carlo for a night of high-stakes gambling, which he thinks is a cover-up for a heist being carried on at another building, he's the most elegant figure in the whole movie.