MOVIE REVIEW : Nolte: The Force Is With Him : Movies: The raunchy, racist world of New York City detectives is profiled in Sidney Lumet’s ‘Q&A.;’

In the opening moments of Sidney Lumet’s thunderingly successful “Q&A;” (citywide), Mike Brennan (Nick Nolte), a bulky, mustachioed New York cop blows away a Latino drug dealer in cold blood, then intimidates the key witnesses to his crime.

Next, in the predawn hours, Francis Aloysius (Al) Reilly, a green assistant district attorney (Timothy Hutton), is rousted from his sleep to take his first official record for the grand jury, the Question and Answer on the crime, which “defines what really happened.” Or should.

Before taking it, Reilly gets his first awed look at the policeman in question: Brennan, at the top of his form, cracking up his fellow detectives with one of his better cop stories, a racist yarn spun in the ripest, most scatological language he knows. And after Brennan’s decades on the force, there’s not much he doesn’t know or couldn’t fake if he had to.

This is today’s NYPD, Lumet-style, a blisteringly obscene unmelted melting pot, where racial epithets flourish like cockroaches and racial ties bind and blind equally. It’s a world that stretches from the department to every enclave the police touch: lawyers, straight or sleazy; ambitious politicos; Puerto Rican drug lords; transsexuals; drag queens and the Mafia--each operating with its own ethnic circle-within-circles.

Lumet adapted this screenplay himself from the 1977 novel by New York Supreme Court Justice Edwin Torres, changing the book’s emphasis slightly to bring out the director’s theme of the omnipotent, conscious racism he sees poisoning his city.

“Q&A;” is neither relentless nor exhausted, something you’d have every reason to expect after Lumet’s “Serpico” and “Prince of the City,” which covered the same turf--seeping, escalating police corruption and cover-up. However, “Q&A;,” more richly theatrical, is great, ripping melodrama, and its shifts in focus--all over the city and beyond to the blindingly bright beaches of Puerto Rico--give the movie a chance to stretch its legs and look up, occasionally, from smoke-grimed official buildings.

Al Reilly’s investigation, which has been called open and shut by his superior, silver-haired homicide chief Kevin Quinn (Patrick O’Neal), turns out to be neither, but of course Lumet wants us to know that from the top. His tension doesn’t turn on that sort of revelation, but on our precise understanding of the facets of each character in this interlocking puzzle.

Reilly discovers gaps the size of manholes in Brennan’s story, and in the course of checking out witnesses digs up the flamboyant top drug man Bobby Texador (Armand Assante), his pony-tail and fingernails long and sleek, his drug connections impeccable, his hatred for Brennan unrelenting. Reilly is stunned to find that Bobby Tex is now living with Reilly’s first great love, Nancy Bosch (Jenny Lumet), daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a black father, who left Reilly when she saw him in a moment of racial bigotry.

Aiding Reilly in the investigation are the black detective “Chappie” (Charles Dutton) and the Puerto Rican-born, streetwise undercover detective Luis Valentin (Luis Guzman). And so this stew begins to cook, with great side dishes such as the beautiful police stoolie, homosexual performer Roger Montalvo (Paul Calderon) and his lover, Jose Malpica (International Chrysis).

A Lumet film is generally crammed with great roles and hand-tooled performances--remember Jerry Ohrbach’s straight-up cop Gus Levy from “Prince of the City”? But “Q&A;” is the treasure hunt of them all. To start at the top, there is Nick Nolte’s Brennan, the “equal opportunity racist” and cheerfully self-proclaimed killer of homosexuals who is at the same time a cop’s cop, “first through the door, the window, the skylight.” It’s Nolte’s boldest, most spellbinding performance; his subtleties in playing this Irish-American monster who believes himself on the front line of “us against them” are profound. At the same time, the barely suppressed danger that suffuses Brennan makes him as much of a ticking bomb as Morgan Freeman’s Fast Black in “Street Smart.”

Next in the department of deeply satisfying subtlety is Reilly’s former mentor at the D.A.’s office, its great, gray eminence, lawyer Leo Bloomenfeld (Lee Richardson). Watch--and listen to--his scene in that classic lawyer’s restaurant-bar; some of Bloomie’s bone-deep indignation may remind you of another bow-tied and tattersalled lawyer years ago, Joseph Welch. Different backgrounds, equal passion for the law and fury for its traducers.

And finally there is the great breakthrough of Armand Assante’s Bobby Tex, a rich, ripe performance that never slips into overripeness. Assante mesmerizes us, his strut, his vocal patterns, caressing some syllables, cutting others off; it’s bravura stuff that, for once in Assante’s career, is perfectly integrated to his character. It’s even more interesting to find that, of this whole bunch, it may be Bobby Tex whose hands are far from clean, whose word is exactly what he says it is.

This being a Lumet production, it looks, feels and sounds precisely right. (It’s rated R for its scalding language and sexual innuendo). There isn’t a clinker in the cast; one wobbly member, perhaps, in the beautiful Jenny Lumet (Lena Horne’s granddaughter), but she gets better after an over-the-top opening scene with Hutton. Hutton, the choirboy of the piece, makes the very best of some earnestly written scenes with her, and gives his own investigation scenes unsuspected strength. And for those who savor the small perfect performance, try Fyvush Finkel as the cooing, infinitely corrupt layer Preston Pearlstein.

If there is memory or justice to the unpredictable business of award-giving in movies, we should see some of these actors again--during nomination time, 1991.