But then Summer of Sam, despite the incarcerated killer's recently aired protestations, is anything but the born-again Berkowitz's sorry story. He's a bit-player in this energetic, violent, sexually charged epic; God's lonely schlub who only pops up now and again to pop a cap in careless canoodling car-bound couples. Lee's film, co-written with Victor Colicchio and Sopranos mainstay Michael Imperoli, is a community project, a tangle embracing the heatwave, riots and power brown-outs that boiled New York in the summer of '77, making the spectre of a homicidal gun-crazy all the more haunting. The cops went cap-in-hand to the Mob, citizens tooled-up with baseball bats to reclaim the streets and brunettes everywhere suddenly went blonde.

Lee's ensemble cast are outstanding. John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino are a squabbling couple, him a hairdresser called Vinny, her Dionna the waitress. Her faithful, him a dirty dog who reserves the missionary position for the wife he respects and everything else for, seemingly, every other woman in the Bronx. Recently, he only just avoided becoming the latest notch on the killer's revolver. Both are superb. And there's Ritchie (Adrien Brody), Vinny's increasingly isolated pal who’s sold his soul to Punk and now sports spiked hair, Union Jack tee-shirts and a gratingly affected Brit-accent. He makes a living dancing in gay clubs. Alongside them the likes of Anthony LaPaglia, Ben Gazzara, Jennifer Esposito, Bebe Neuwirth, Michael Badalucco and the director himself do sterling service.

This is Lee's first almost entirely white picture and the result, although immediately recognisable (hard light, floating cameras and the hallucinatory look of the killer's own fly-blown apartment), has the clock-wound verve of vintage Scorsese. The screenplay is rich, flavoursome (the bickering between Leguizamo and Sorvino is especially well done) and surprisingly compassionate, marshalling a broad cast with ease. But it’s only in Lee's dextrous hands that the whole really comes alive. He's been prone in the past to being both very good (Do The Right Thing, Clockers, the documentary Four Little Girls) and very bad (Girl 6, the monstrously dull Crooklyn), but this film finds him at the top of his game. Funny, ambitious and provocative, his visit to the decade that taste forgot is far more than its positioning amidst the currently fashionable retro-chic posturing suggests. See it.