Ridley Scott's gangster epic is a classic rags-to-riches tale, writes Donald Clarke

Americans will insist on slapping their national adjective on films, books, songs, plays and poems. American Pastoral, American Idiot, American Pie, American Graffiti, American Gigolo: the artists of the New World never tire of seeking ways to encapsulate their entire nation - its follies and glories - through the investigation of one archetypal entity.

You wouldn't call a film Irish Gangster, would you? English Gangster sounds even less sensible. Yet here we are. A man with the first president's surname plays an African- American drug dealer who flooded Harlem with cheap, pure heroin in the 1970s and, thus, challenged the Mafia's hold on New York.

Yes, the picture is directed by a septuagenarian from Tyneside. But this remains a classic exercise in the genre of American Something. What made Frank Lucas so quintessentially American? Can his story really exemplify the nation?

As Ridley Scott's gripping, persuasive film tells it, Frank began life as the driver and all round dogsbody for "Bumpy" Johnson, the kingpin of Harlem. On the older hoodlum's death, Lucas moved quickly to develop new methods of importing heroin from Asia to Manhattan.

To this point, the smuggling of drugs and their subsequent distribution were separate operations handled by distinct groups of villains. Flouting convention, Lucas travelled to Vietnam, negotiated directly with the warlords and began importing the product back to the US in the coffins of American soldiers.

Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian make sure to point towards the horrific cost of Lucas's grubby trade. Needles are forever ramming into stringy veins and, more than once, the camera happens upon a mother dying beside her desperate, wailing child. One of Frank's first steps in his career as drugs entrepreneur is to blow the head off a stroppy rival on a busy, sunlit street.

For all that, there is no getting away from the fact that the American Hero of this American Story called American Gangster is Mr Lucas.

Russell Crowe, always at his best when fat and boisterous, is on good form as Richie Roberts, the slovenly cop pursuing the uptown potentate. But Denzel Washington's natural dignity bestows such sober distinction on the hoodlum that he emerges oddly unblemished from his swamp of illicit misery.

What really distinguishes Washington's Frank Lucas from the petty villains around him - and from the corrupt cops who hinder Roberts's investigation - is his single-minded dedication to the great god Work.

Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Neil McCauley in Heat, Lucas is a criminal ascetic who frowns upon indiscipline and vulgarity and who is only truly alive when pursuing his grim career. Richie Roberts - you could tell this was one of those two-sides-of-the-same- coin stories, couldn't you? - does not share his prey's punctilious personal habits, but he, too, seems like only half-a-man when separated from the apparatus of his vocation.

The film does, thus, deal in a very American school of professional Puritanism. Do your job. Be on time. Take only two weeks holiday a year.

Ridley Scott, usually more of a Cavalier than a Roundhead, allows these austere philosophies to affect his choices as director. This is a good thing. We have seen quite enough Dayglo, Funkadelic-heavy recreations of the 1970s to last us until the decade comes around again in 60 years time. Scott offers us, grey washed-out images, he allows the cast sensible haircuts and, most importantly, he avoids the temptation to play Bobby Womack's Across 110th Street until the picture's 90th minute (or so).

It is as if he has been listening to Lucas's advice, delivered with firm menace to his lieutenants, to avoid overly groovy clothes and always dress for work. What emerges is a kind of anti-Super Fly, a film concerned less with dynamism than with application. Perhaps it could have been called American Businessman.