Desperate measures

Two great, thoroughly inhabited performances -- by Paddy Considine and Oscar Isaac -- drive “PU-239,” a dark, sometimes funny, often violent HBO movie about fatherhood, set in the lawless Wild East of a cutthroat, capitalist Russia. Written and directed by Scott Z. Burns (who wrote the screenplay for “The Bourne Ultimatum” and produced “An Inconvenient Truth”), from a short story by Ken Kalfus, it counts director Steven Soderbergh, regular HBO partner George Clooney and Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”) among its several executive producers.

The film follows the converging paths of Timofey (Considine) -- a nuclear-plant worker lethally dosed with radiation who sets out for Moscow with a canister of stolen plutonium to raise money for his family -- and Shiv (Isaac), a soft-hearted, low-level criminal whose treacherous and incompetent partners have saddled him with a death sentence of his own.

Shot on location in Bucharest, Romania and Moscow (by Eigil Bryld, “Becoming Jane”), “PU-239” has something of the worked-over look of a Soderbergh picture, but with the human scale and bedraggled emotional intimacy of a Cassavetes film.(That is, it has style without being merely stylish.) As Timofey’s wife, Radha Mitchell (“Melinda and Melinda”) is the best-known face in an excellent supporting cast that keeps this tough, strange tale watchable and real.

(HBO, Sat., 8 p.m.)

-- Robert Lloyd