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How do you start the best crime drama of this century and easily the finest, coolest film (so far) of 2007?

With a jolt. Bad-man Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) lights an unnamed, unarmed chump — tied to a chair in an alley somewhere — on fire. After a few seconds of screaming, Lucas pulls a pistol and shoots the guy quiet.

Thirty seconds in, "American Gangster" strikes an electric note that doesn't let up until it's over, 156 1/2 exhilarating minutes later.

Lucas was a real-life gangster who built a personal empire in the late 1960s and early '70s selling great heroin at a low-low price. His story is powerful — epic — and Washington, co-star Russell Crowe, director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian collaborate brilliantly in making every moment pop on the screen.

Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the cop whose fate ultimately helixes with Lucas'. The characters are striking contrasts — it's genius, really. Roberts is Boy Scout to a fault, at one early point turning in almost $1 million in cash he could have pocketed without anyone knowing.

He's a smart, tough cop, but the other officers hate him for playing so straight. His personal life is a wreck. He's a womanizer and lousy father, suffering through a brutal divorce.

Lucas, on the other hand, is a smart-dressing sociopathic murderer, pulling obscene profits from the suffering of thousands. He's also wonderful to his family. He goes to church with his mom every Sunday.

We see a scene in which he's courting the beauty queen (Lymari Nadal) he'll eventually marry. He could have taken her to any of his houses or apartments all over the country, he explains coolly, but he brought her to his home so she could meet his mama.

Scott then cuts to a scene of Crowe, answering his door in a dingy undershirt. A flight attendant plants a quick French kiss as she hurries out, bumping past a woman from Social Services waiting to interview Roberts.

At Thanksgiving we see Lucas carrying a monster turkey from the kitchen to the table, where a dozen happy family members await. Cut to Roberts, making a chicken salad sandwich, alone, mashing potato chips between slices of bread.

These thoughtful characterizations pepper a plot that's pure movie gold. Dirty cops were murder for the drug trade in the late '70s, shaking down dealers, cutting down their product and putting diluted dope back on the street.

Lucas was a thug, as daring as Tony Montana, but he was also very smart. Recognizing the Vietnam War as an opportunity to get heroin directly from its source, he used the military to smuggle dope out of Southeast Asia in the coffins of dead soldiers. This brought the best junk New York had ever seen, and with that came big-time, superfly power. (The police take a long while to clue in, because it made no sense to them that a black man could procure better drugs and more money than the Italian mob.)

The Vietnam War isn't just a veiled backdrop; Lucas goes there, deep into the sticky jungle, and Scott takes us along. It's just another big, dazzling set piece in this big, dazzling film.

How fantastic and fitting, for instance, that one of the film's most important and stimulating scenes brings all the key characters together at 1971's "Fight of the Century" between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. (You'll never forget the coat Lucas wears to Madison Square Garden, and — as the real Lucas has stated in interviews — neither will he.)

There are intense exchanges between clean cops and dirty cops (Josh Brolin is great as slimy Detective Trupo) and between black gangsters and Italian mobsters. There are big themes blurring the line between drug dealers and businessmen, conveyed through blunt street violence and machete-sharp dialogue.

A fantastically choreographed shootout brings the film toward a rousing conclusion.

And there are Crowe and Washington, two forces of nature who share the film evenly, but wait to share the screen. It's not quite De Niro and Pacino in "Heat" when Lucas and Roberts finally come face-to-face, but it's close.

This is the movie that fans of "The Godfather," "Scarface," "Goodfellas," and "Heat" have been waiting for. "The Departed" almost got there last year. Today, "American Gangster" nails it.