Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary Boogie Nights is a film about transition. It’s about the transition of Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), a polite, nice looking 17-year-old bus-boy with a prodigious penis, into Dirk Diggler, the hottest cock to penetrate the US smut market in a generation. And it’s about the transition of said industry from the almost respectable Deep Throat years, through to the multi-million dollar unisex VCR business of today.

Jack Horner is a director of the old school, grown rich and resistant to harsh economic realities as the 80s dawn over hardcore’s Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley. He is patriarch to an extended, bizarre but ineffably loyal family.

There’s Amber Waves (the always impressive Julianne Moore, on top form), porn queen and de facto mother to the clan. And Rollergirl (a superb Heather Graham), trundling everywhere in skimpy shorts and roller-skates, and who just loves to fuck at daddy’s instruction. Dirk joins them, rejected by his own mother, as their adopted son - one not only grateful for a blow-job from Sis, but prepared to get mom off for the camera. The family that fucks together, stays together, so to speak.

Anderson’s film is an episodic epic that puts us in mind of Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The structure is certainly purloined: young lad initiated into a tightly-knit society, finds himself slowly intoxicated. Inevitably, however, there is a price to pay, and we in turn must travel through Dirk’s hell - drugs, fallings out and Mr Diggler finding himself unable to get his thirteen inches up, let alone come on demand - to welcome a kind of redemption. Though given that AIDS lurks menacingly around the next corner, the end is properly ambiguous.

Anderson handles all of this with a exceptional eye, his use of lengthy StediCam takes, quick cut close-ups and sudden edits fostering further Scorsese comparisons and lending his film the kind of visual dynamism - especially in the coke-sprawl second half - seldom seen outside of Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing suite. Occasional bouts of brutal violence are brilliantly handled. You could argue it’s perhaps a little derivative (Dirk’s speech to the mirror is very Raging Bull), but as only the second feature from a film-maker still very much in his twenties, its directorial intuition is astonishing. And if the scene with Alfred Molina’s drug dealer is not strictly dramatically necessary, as a piece of genuinely dangerous, edge-of-seat film-making it’s hard to fault.

Performances too are spot on. Wahlberg makes good on the promise of The Basketball Diaries with a first rate portrait of innocence corrupted. William H (Fargo) Macy is touching as the tragic Little Bill, a crew member whose philandering wife will gleefully screw anything not nailed down. Watch too for a small but very affecting showing from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the gay soundman. And Reynolds, who is reportedly a little embarrassed about it all now, has simply never made a better film.

Near the knuckle, very funny, and emotionally involving, Boogie Nights is an ingenious and surprisingly mature piece that never tries to out-smart its players (a la Querentino) nor wallow in nostalgic kitsch for its own sake (8-Tracks of its great platform-souled disco-stomp soundtrack). An epic canvas of small lives that’s touched by no small measure of greatness.