MOVIE REVIEW : ‘STREETS’: A WIN BUT NOT BY KNOCKOUT

“Streets of Gold” (citywide) is an unlikely boxing film that does most of its counterpunching on character and substitutes heart for sock. No great movie, it’s more of a pleasant, out-of-left-field surprise.

It survives even though the three writers (Heywood Gould, Richard Price and Tom Cole) have built it on what might seem a cripplingly phony, chauvinistic gimmick. Alek Neuman (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a Russian Jew kept off the Olympic team by anti-Semitism, emigrates to New York where he stays awash in self-pity and booze until he stumbles on two local boys, whom he trains to beat his old coach--in town on a “good will” tour.

The boys (one black, one Irish-American) are streetwise antagonists who hang tough under Alek’s grueling regimen. Alek is a lost soul clawing up from the depths, grabbing at his burnt-out immigrant’s dream of American “streets of gold” under the real-life grime.

While this may sound like a bush-league variant of “Rocky IV,” you may be surprised at how much this movie churns you up and grabs you emotionally. At its best, it seethes and vibrates with low, gritty passion. As Alek, Brandauer dominates, working in great leaping arcs of tension. The actors who play his surrogate family are all fine too: Wesley Snipes and Adrian Pasdar perfect as his fighters, Angela Molina gorgeous as his lover. And though Joe Roth has never directed before, he sustains an electric, spontaneous mood throughout.

Cinematographer Arthur Albert and editor Richard Chew give the movie a compelling smoky-gritty look and a nervous, headlong pace. But, whatever its strengths or flaws, “Streets of Gold” (MPAA-rated: R) comes at you swinging. Too bad it winds up stuck in vacant ‘80s conventions of programmed uplift.