Fade from black: an inky metropolis decked with blooms of luminous white. Rain falls softly on a balcony, sending black pools of water into turmoil, and a woman leans on a railing, arrayed against the cityscape. She stands out, not because she is beautiful (she is), nor because her figure is sublime (which it is), but because her dress is red—a bright, sparkling mustang red—the only color intruding on a panorama that’s otherwise entirely black-and-white. The image comes from Sin City, and, with it, co-directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez establish their credo: here is film noir, but unlike anything ever before seen.

Set in Basin City, a fictional New York-Los Angeles hybrid that fuses only the worst of both, Sin City slaps together three intersecting story lines and a perfectly executed bookend from the pages of Frank Miller’s graphic novels. Faithful to the extreme, every shot and line of dialogue is a recreation of the comics’ frames and words (hence Rodriguez’s supremely magnanimous gesture to make Miller his co-director—a move that violated the Directors Guild’s one director-one film policy and precipitated his ouster from the DGA). Rodriguez is a great beneficiary of the graphic novels’ cinematic tendencies; their compositions have a dynamism and a balance analogous to celluloid, and the text betrays that Miller possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of noir conventions. So while the screen crackles with incendiary violence, silicone-enhanced skin, and popcorn dialogue for the fanboys, there’s enough intellectual heft and generic deconstruction underpinning the blood, tits, and verbal patter to keep the rest of us engaged.

The plot threads are whittled down to essentialist hard boiled fiction: Jack Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is a cynical-humanist detective plunged into no end of mental and physical torture as he protects a young girl (the sinuous Jessica Alba) from a would-be rapist-murderer with power connections up to the highest echelons of government. Dwight (a surprisingly unengaging Clive Owen) is thrust into a turf war between the mob and the prostitutes (led by Gail, played by the vampy Rosario Dawson) who are allowed to police their own red-light district—until a cataclysmic event threatens to abrogate the truce between whores and cops. And then there is the film’s emotional and structural core: Marv, a barrel-chested, brutally scarred social outcast who’s a blend of brutal physicality, wry humor, and very few moral qualms. Under Mickey Rourke’s brilliant performance that is by turns cruel and touching, Marv’s revenge-induced anger is a slow simmer, a barely contained inferno that erupts into paroxysms of violence as he sets out to avenge the death of a hooker—doling out punishment to hitmen, complicit clergymen, and a cannibal (Elijah Wood) along the way. Through it all, the film experiments with narration. Each tough guy is given a slightly different rendition of noir voiceovers—one world-weary, one gruff and dryly mocking, one barely in touch with the world.

Looking back on these synopses, Sin City sounds absurdly comic, but within the strictures of its logic, the stories work, because while Rodriguez approached the task of adapting Miller’s novels with due gravity, that seriousness does not translate to a seriousness in the text. In the direction, there is a wry, self-deprecating acknowledgement of the film’s excesses. I think that’s where much of the critical backlash has been misguided: mistaking for earnestness what could only be perceived as caricature (which of course, is the highest form of flattery). Multiple characters saying “Yeesh!” in a manner that almost makes the cartoon bubbles visible before our eyes? Parody. People that return from the dead despite being riddled with enough bullets to down an elephant? Parody. A man apparently shot dead only to survive via the oldest trick in the book—the bullet hit an object in his breast pocket? Out and out parody. That is not to say that there aren’t moments of agonizing humorlessness—Dwight calling Gail a “Valkyrie” more than once—and no-one can deny the sobering quality of his violence, but the majority of Rodriguez’s address is patently tongue in cheek.

His subject, as much as it covers a set of seedy characters in an even more depraved setting, is film noir itself. It is difficult to not be a fan of the genre—the cinema seems to have been made for the gaudy patter of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe and all the rest—but there was always something dissatisfying about the way it’s been executed. Not until viewing Sin City did it become obvious: Noir fails to deliver on a good deal of what it promises. The genre gets its name from a common trope of brooding, starkly shadowed atmospheres, but the proliferation of greys saturating the screen are unavoidable. (This isn’t meant to be a straw-man rebuttal, i.e. “film noir isn’t really black,” because that would be churlish. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the limits in celluloid’s chemical properties and the imagination of various cinematographers. I can count only a handful of films—Touch of Evil, The Third Man, and perhaps Kiss Me Deadly—that are well and truly dark). Noir’s blackness also refers to the debased morals by which its stories structure themselves, not to mention the way its characters lead their lives but are ultimately enslaved to the Hays code, firmly rooted in a disquieting, evangelical brand of Judeo-Christian morality: the femme fatale gets her comeuppance, criminals end up behind bars, and order is restored to the righteous world. Sin City therefore feels like a response to the failings in the cinematic imagining of Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s prose, the hyperbolic endgame for film noir that fulfils the genre’s potential. Noir’s aesthetics are supposed to be black, but never has there been a chiaroscuro more complete and absolute. Blacks with unfathomable depth collide with a white so blindingly brilliant, with the faintest motes of shimmering silver—or better, pearly argent, so near-white is its hue—occupying what once was middle grey. Noir is supposed to be morally murky, but few films approach the level of depravity present here. Acts of unspeakable violence are the dominant mode of social discourse in Basin City, and everyone is complicit.

Aesthetically, the palette manages something paradoxical: it both intensifies and dulls the impact of onscreen violence. Like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Sin City is an experiment in blood artistry, but this time in colors. Characters bleed in black, white, red, and yellow, making effects cartoony and thus allowing a degree of emotional distance. Yet the horror’s underlying maxim is that suggestion is infinitely more terrifying than direct display, because it allows the viewers to imagine a myriad of horrors. Rodriguez takes a page from scary movies; for me, scenes of severed limbs bleeding pure-white plasma were infinitely more gut-wrenching than sights showing accurately red human blood. With this palette, he’s created some of the most indelible tableaux of this still-young movie year: few images have been creepier than Elijah Wood smiling beatifically after going under Rourke’s knife or Del Toro coming back from the dead to give advice to an addled Clive Owen; no action sequences are more captivating than Rourke crashing through a cop cruiser’s front windshield or pummelling a phalanx of corrupt policemen.

In light of Frank Miller’s considerable hand in Sin City, giving all the credit to Rodriguez is dubious, even more so given that Tarantino too directed one sequence. Nonetheless, he has gone a long way to move himself out from underneath QT’s long and pervasive shadow. Call it the übernoir answer to Kill Bill: a formalist exercise with heft, a heart, and a mind.