If you're looking for a no-frills movie with plenty of kick, your search may be over. Writer Frank Scott (Out of Sight and Minority Report) has tried his hand at direction, and he has made a movie that mines psychologically rich territory in lots of knowing ways.

In The Lookout, Joseph Gordon- Levitt plays a former golden boy who suffered brain damage in a car crash. Gordon-Levitt's Chris Pratt survived, but with a badly fractured memory and deep veins of guilt. A former high school hockey star, Chris was responsible for the accident. He pushed his luck too far, and it resulted in the death of two of the passengers in his car.

The accident, shown in the movie's gripping prologue, sets the stage for a story that unfolds four years later. Disabled but affable, Chris has taken a job as the night janitor at a bank. He shares an apartment with a blind roommate (Jeff Daniels), someone he met at the local skills center, a place he goes for encouragement and rehab.

Chris went from being a young man with a blazing future to a marginal guy with a caseworker (Carla Gugino). To negotiate his world, he writes instructions to himself on a notepad. He has trouble following a sequence of events. He tends to fall asleep at the wrong moments.

In a bar, Chris meets the affable but dangerous Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode). Spargo convinces Chris that he deserves a better hand than the one he's been dealt. He proposes a bank robbery, billing it less as larceny than a form of entitlement.

And it doesn't hurt that a former stripper, the aptly named Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher), puts the moves on Chris, who suddenly realizes that he may not have been expelled from the garden of pleasure and love.

Starting with the excellent Gordon-Levitt, the cast is first-rate. Chris hasn't lost his entire personality, but at times you wonder how much of him remains. Gordon-Levitt somehow seems to have drained half the life from his face.

Goode, Fisher and Daniels are also in fine form. Bruce McGill has a nice turn as Chris' father, and Sergio Di Zio comes off as a goofy but ultimately surprising deputy sheriff.

Scott gives the movie's heist the right amount of tension, and he fills the screen with increasing amounts of menace. Although the movie's ending may not have quite the expected bite, The Lookout does a fine job sustaining the austerity of tone that's necessary for a movie such as this.

"I wake up. I take a shower - with soap," says Chris, who must focus on the simplest of tasks to stay on track. Scott's script feels as economical and focused as an entry in Chris' diary, and it provides the framework for a thriller that, for the most part, has been hard-boiled to near perfection.

The Lookout

A brain-damaged man is lured into a robbery.

• Grade: B+

• Rated: R

• Running time: 102 minutes