The problem with most movies about mobsters -- the Italianate variety anyway, the ones we see in the "Godfather" films -- is that they tend to sentimentalize their subjects as primitive idealists. We witness the goons' iron loyalty to la famiglia and see them doting on their cannolis and chuckling their little bambinos under the chin, and we figure: good people, basically. With guns, true, but still.

The Italian mob flick "Gomorrah" will have none of that. Here, we see the thugs of the Camorra, Italy's oldest criminal fraternity (like the Mafia, but operating to the north, around Naples), in all their non-glory: blowing away women, corrupting children, trafficking in crack and grenade-launchers, polluting the land with illegal hazmat dumping, befouling society at just about every level. The movie is raw and scummy, like its subject, and unstintingly grim. The Corleones would be appalled, possibly terrified.

The picture is based on a book -- an international best-seller -- that's so accurate, apparently, that its author, the young Neapolitan journalist Roberto Saviano, has spent the last two years enjoying round-the-clock police protection. Saviano weighed in on the screenplay for the film, along with director Matteo Garrone, and the resulting movie -- featuring a few performers who actually are mobbed-up, to the point of having since been arrested -- has the look and feel of a war documentary.

It also has the loose structure of Steven Soderbergh's coke-trade chronicle, "Traffic," although it's even looser. The central characters recur, but don't intermingle, allowing multiple, discrete perspectives on how the Camorra works. The main setting is a suburban slum -- a vast, soul-sucking concrete pile of a housing project -- where squads of armed brutes patrol the endless levels, overseeing a teeming drug market and leaning heavily on the locals. Thirteen-year-old Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a freckle-faced delivery boy whose inevitable initiation into the mob involves trustfully donning a bulletproof vest and being shot in the chest by an elder lowlife. ("Now you're a man," the marksman announces.) Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are a pair of teenage nutjobs (and "Scarface" fans) who think they're gangsters already, but have a lot to learn, much of it painful. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a mob-financed tailor who hasn't quite learned the lesson of total loyalty; Franco (Toni Servillo) is a mock-suave operator with truckloads of toxic waste to deposit wherever he damn well pleases; and Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a mild-mannered bagman who's nervously considering another line of work.

Garrone, who won a Grand Prize at Cannes for this film, elbows into the splattery action with minimal resort to the glib, frenzied editing that has become a cliché in this sort of picture; and the fresh oddity of some of the scenes -- Marco and Ciro stalking a saltmarsh in their underwear, for instance, chewing up the landscape with their stolen machine guns and totaling a boat with a rocket -- adds quivers of everyday chaos. The movie presents the Camorra as a meat grinder through which all things within its orbit must pass. The characters' lives are walled-in and mean, their stunted dreams ever-receding.

Check out everything we've got on "Gomorrah."

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