Denzel Washington (Training Day, American Gangster) vulnerable? Sure, we’ve seen that before. While there are more exceptions than rules, we have seen Washington play roles where his character doesn’t always have the answers or is susceptible to outcomes beyond his control. These films include Flight, Man on Fire, Out of Time,  John Q, Fences, and He Got Game. But scared? Outside of John Q, I don’t know if there’s a movie where one of his characters has been so frantic that he is completely hidden from the confident and poised Denzel that we expect and love. All of that changes in Dan Gilroy’s Roman J. Israel Esq., his follow-up directorial performance after blazing onto the Hollywood landscape with 2014’s Nightcrawler.

Washington’s performance as the title character isn’t the only reason to watch this film, but it is undoubtedly the main one if you were forced to select one reason. Set in present-day Los Angeles, you’d think this movie was straight out of the 1970s if you looked at just its lead character. Israel (Washington) is pudgy. There has never been a movie in which his physical appearance looked worse. He sports an unkempt afro, wears oversized pilot glasses, gap-tooth that he frequently showcases with his goofy smile, and dresses in three-piece suits that haven’t been in fashion in decades and happen to still look baggy, despite him being 25 pounds overweight. He wears headphones connected to an old-school iPod wherever he goes. He also carries around a beat-up brown leather briefcase that wouldn’t sell for $1 at a yard sale. He is part of a two-person law firm for the underprivileged in which his partner William Jackson is the face of the firm and does all of the trial work and meetings with clients while Roman does the research, writes the briefs, and advises him on what to do in each case. When his partner has a heart attack, Roman is forced to step in, at least in the short term.

We see Roman in a trial and learn immediately that he is a very ethical and well-meaning defense attorney who will shoot you straight with everything he has. He’s not afraid to make a big splash in a small pond. But each time he starts speaking, whether to a judge or a client, we instantly can tell why he is half of the firm that does the behind-the-scenes work. We also learn that the firm is failing financially and that William is unlikely to recover from his comma. Roman is forced to shut the company’s doors (the timeline in this film is accelerated). Struggling to make ends meet, Roman tries to find work with the National Assembly for Civil Rights, an organization founded by Maya (Carmen Ejogo – It Comes At Night, Alien: Covenant), one of William’s friends. Unfortunately, they do not have a paid position they can offer him. So instead, he takes a job with George Pierce (Colin Farrell – Cassandra’s Dream, The Lobster), a successful defense attorney who sometimes gave lost cause cases he didn’t want to William and Roman. He recognizes Roman’s innate knowledge of the legal code.

At its most basic level, this movie is very, very simple. It’s cut and dry if you want it to be. And if you want it to be, there’s nothing wrong with that. Without giving anything away, our protagonist runs into a little bit of trouble when something is dangled in his face that is too tempting not to take. The entire movie, except for its first and one of its last scenes, is set in what’s supposed to be a flashback. Roman himself is incriminating himself for something he has done. But in this flashback scene, we see Roman breach his ethics and everything he stands for, and we are left with the frightened shell of a man that I presented in the first paragraph of this review. Instead of preaching his morals and trying to infuse an old-school mentality onto a new wave of lawyers and criminals, Roman gets caught in his situation, forcing him to begin living a paranoid lifestyle. And how the movie plays out isn’t anything galvanizing or requiring you to think. If you’re like me, this movie will draw comparisons to the fantastic A Simple Plan.