The ambient fury of the director James Gray’s teeming historical drama is built into the very fabric of his tensely unbalanced wide-screen images. From the start, longing looks offscreen conjure the dark side of the American paradigm: Ewa (Marion Cotillard), a Polish immigrant, arrives at Ellis Island in 1921 with her sister (Angela Sarafyan), who is quarantined with tuberculosis and threatened with deportation. A mysterious benefactor takes Ewa in hand: Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), who claims to be an aid worker and turns out to be a sex-show impresario and a pimp. Unable to escape his clutches, she turns to his cousin, Emil (Jeremy Renner), a small-time magician whose intentions are pure. Gray (who co-wrote the script with the late Ric Menello) unfolds an intricate, involuted panorama of the degradation and corruption of the Lower East Side’s roiling tenements. Cotillard’s tightly controlled performance and Phoenix’s explosive one lend the period décor a flayed immediacy. With a high-tension stillness of psychic violence bursting into bloodshed, the director breaks through naturalism to find the living nightmares underneath national and urban mythologies.