Clive Owen flexes his acting muscles in Men

As an actor, Clive Owen has been known since his breakthrough in Mike Nichols' Croupier as a laconic, hangdog presence adept at playing character roles that hinted at leading actor status -- tempestuous in Closer yet too laid-back for his mythic role in King Arthur. As a director, Alfonso Cuaron has been known since his own breakthrough road movie Y Tu Mamá También as a director who riffs on sexuality and sex itself, taking inspiration from the illogical things it makes us do -- evident in the steamy scenes of Y Tu Mamá También but toned down for his Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban. In other words, both have always held unrealized potential beneath the surface, waiting to bubble over in a way that would challenge Hollywood conventions -- the low-key leading man, the movie with sex on the brain.

Together, Cuaron and Owen have let themselves boil, Hollywood be damned, and in doing so have created Children of Men, a film labeled "dystopian," "challenging" and "Blade Runner-esque" but ultimately a movie that aims, despite its bleak depiction of the future, squarely at the present day. The premise is simple, and in its simplicity it shines. Imagine a world hit by a flu -- a nasty bug that medicine can't seem to stop from spreading into the industrialized bastions of the First World -- a flu that, when it doesn't kill, stops women from having children. With no pregnancies, the world stagnates, chokes, falters and falls apart.

Cuaron's vision of the future has no flying cars or clean, anesthetic lines like Spielberg's Minority Report. If anything, it is dirtier and smoggier than ever. Middle-class Londoners like Owen's Theo go about their urban jobs in a monotonous lethargy. The world, it seems, is slower, grimier and darker without kids, and Theo, a character seemingly etched onto Owen's own lanky frame, sinks into the whiskey flask as he stumbles from office to home, even as the city literally explodes around him.

Children of Men proceeds in this murky, muddy vein as Theo is contacted by the Fishes, a group of terrorists (the film never makes it clear if we are to call them guerilla, insurgents or freedom fighters) led by his ex-wife Julian, a fiery Julianne Moore, who ask him to help them escort a young and frightened Kee (Claire Hope) by using his links to government to find the necessary transport papers. A short trip to a cousin with connections leads Theo on a dizzy, bloody car chase and links him indelibly with Kee as they spiral downward into the mess of the "fugee" underground -- the vast, cancerous camps the British government has established to keep unwanted refugees -- out of their dying nation. Though the formula of the reluctant hero has long since been a staple of screenwriters, Owen's Theo is a moral man with a pragmatic streak, and Kee's revelation that she is pregnant -- which Cuaron films almost as a nativity scene in a drafty barn in the British countryside, Kee surrounded by lowing cows and her face a freeze-frame of hope and despair -- is all the motivation he, a father who has lost a son, needs.

With just Owen, Hope and Cuaron doing the heavy lifting, the film would be a solid piece of futurist thinking (a sort of intellectual V For Vendetta) but thanks to the haunted, wearied actors who accompany Theo and Kee and the washed-out, soiled pastels of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Children of Men transforms from a "what if" quandary to a slap in the face. The future becomes a frightening reflection of our own present thanks to the sheer amount of reality poured into the scenes -- the actors look and talk like our neighbors and the world looks and sounds like our world, with its tightening, choking borders. Michael Caine's Jasper, a 60-ish New Age intellectual and Theo's closest confidante, combs the hair of his catatonic wife, grows marijuana and listens to plaintive Italian Rolling Stones covers. Within the fugee camp of Bexhill, a cement and cinderblock hell that combines the worst imagery of the Balkans wars and abandoned Soviet apartment blocks, the scenes become almost echoes of the exhausted images of Baghdad or Srebrenica or Somalia that have flickered across our TV sets and briefly nestled in our short attention spans over the last 10 years, except all the languages and cultures and religions and people that bloodied the ground fighting for dominance are all contained within one burning city. As Theo and Kee flee the city, Cuaron and Lubezki produce some of the most vivid, jarring imagery of what war does to a place since Cimino's The Deer Hunter presented Vietnam's dark heart.

Cuaron refuses to gratify his audience with a clean-cut resolution. Instead, he ends with a scene that dissolves into the mist of a foggy British evening, hinting at both the terrible and the beautiful at once.