Nearly 30 years on from the film that launched him on a career that would soon establish him as the leading screen actor of his generation, Robert De Niro is leaving his recent comedy career behind and going back down the mean streets. But in City by the Sea, it’s not the mean streets of Manhattan’s Little Italy that provide the setting: it’s the once-comfortable streets and boulevards of Long Beach, Long Island, on which his character, Detective Vincent LaMarca, grew up.

In a quiet irony of which director Michael Caton-Jones (who last worked with De Niro on This Boy’s Life in 1992) and screenwriter Ken Hixon were almost certainly aware, Detective LaMarca now lives a solitary and very private life in Little Italy, listening to classical music and attending occasional lectures on silent cinema at the New School. These days, it is Long Beach, the once idyllic neighbourhood in which he used to live, that has turned mean.

MEAN STREETS Robert De Niro as veteran NYPD cop Vincent LaMarca.

More to the point, Long Beach becomes the setting for a character-based action thriller which sees De Niro’s character descend into the lower depths to confront something that is partly destiny and partly a curse that seems to have been placed on the male members of his family.

City by the Sea starts out with an unintentional murder when two young addicts, Joey (James Franco) and Snake (Brian Tarantina), kill a pusher, and it has two parallel themes: Vincent’s life in Manhattan; and Joey’s desperate attempts to escape from Spyder (William Forsythe), the sinister drug dealer who thinks he has been robbed. What links the two themes is the fact that Joey, as we gradually come to realise, is Vincent’s son. That and the Long Beach setting.

“When I was a kid out here,” Vincent tells his partner, Reg (George Dzunda), as they head out on a case involving a ‘floater’ in the river, “everything was brand new - clean. Everybody had just bought their first car, their first house… Now it looks like the Serbian Army came through… People stopped caring. It turns to shit when people stop caring.”

Long Beach, the ‘city by the sea’ of the film’s title, was one of those dream suburbs of the fifties - the ones that appeared in the background of Saturday Evening Post ads, the ones where Dagmar and Blondie used to live. But, for little Vincent LaMarca, the idyll was soon destroyed. His father, Angelo, a basically decent man who was drifting into debt, bungled a kidnap - a “brilliant, idiotic, stupid idea”, as Vincent puts it - and ended up on death row for the murder of the baby.

De Niro on set with director Michael Caton-Jones

Vincent was raised by a cop’s family and, after a tour of duty in ’Nam, became a cop himself, even marrying the daughter of the career cop who had adopted him. But he became restless, and his marriage began to disintegrate, before finally being destroyed by a moment of domestic violence. Subsequently Vincent has retreated from the world, throwing himself into his job and throwing up the barriers around him. The only person for whom he lets them down is the woman from the apartment on the floor below, Michelle (Frances McDormand).

The pairing of De Niro and McDormand gives City by the Sea a cast that can lay claim to two Oscar-winners at his head (De Niro has won twice - for The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull; McDormand, nominated for Mississippi Burning, finally won for Fargo). And the relationship between Vincent and Michelle, with its edge of tension, provides a sharp contrast to the breathtaking action of the film’s opening and closing sections. The affair has clearly been going on for some time, but Vincent has avoided commitment, unable to tell Michelle about his past. Which is when Vincent’s past begins to catch up with him.