In "Bridge of Spies," a gravely moody, perfectly directed thriller, Steven Spielberg returns you to the good old bad days of the Cold War and its great fictions, with their bottomless political chasms and moral gray areas. With a story that has been plucked from the historical record, given a nice dusting and a little sweetening, the movie centers on a 1962 spy swap involving a Soviet mole, Rudolf Abel; an American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, shot down by the Soviets; and an American student, Frederic L. Pryor, who had ended up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall at the worst possible time. All were chess pieces in a ghastly game that, the film balefully suggests, continues without end.
Opening in 1957, when the Cold War was atomically hot, "Bridge of Spies" offers up a world of shadows and the men who haunt them for country, company (as in C.I.A.) and ideology. Like some of Mr. Spielberg's other recent movies, notably "Lincoln" and "Munich," this one is a meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present. Yet it also feels lighter than those films, less weighted down by accreted history or maybe by a sense of duty to its significance. There are still stirring speeches and swells of important music – this is Steven Spielberg – yet for all the darkness there is also laughter, which finally may be the only reasonable response to the specter of worldwide nuclear annihilation.
In "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," Stanley Kubrick faced that threat with a demented whoop and the terminal sight of Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb as if it were a bronco. Mr. Spielberg doesn't embrace the dark side as brutally as Kubrick, or with such finality, but over the years he has become more comfortable admitting its existence. (There are nods to Kubrick in "Spies," including on a marquee.) Even so, Mr. Spielberg is a canny entertainer and for "Bridge of Spies" he has roped in Tom Hanks, an approachable star who can go dark but wasn't built to remain there long. He plays the movie's voice of conscience, a kind of Mr. American Integrity named James B. Donovan, the lawyer who represents Abel and is swept up in high-stakes espionage.
The film opens in an unlikely spy den, a shabby studio in a Brooklyn tenement where Abel – a magnificent Mark Rylance – is staring into a mirror. Thin of hair and body, the ends of his mouth pulled down into a permanent frown, Abel looks wrung out, juiceless. He's as drab as the room in which he is painting a self-portrait, daubing on color that help turns the scene into a masterpiece of bleak. This sallow man evokes the start of "The Age of Anxiety," W. H. Auden's era-defining 1947 long poem, which begins with a figure (displaced, in his way, like Abel) staring at his reflection in a barroom mirror and musing about his double's world — a vision that seems perfectly in keeping with the stealth intellectualism of Ethan and Joel Coen, who rewrote the film's original script by Matt Charman.
The opening of "Spies" is sublimely quiet. There's no music and scarcely any dialogue, just a series of quick-sketch scenes of Abel painting, wordlessly receiving a telephone call and retrieving an encoded message in a hollowed-out nickel. (This introduction evokes other labor-intensive overtures like those in "Wall-E" and "There Will Be Blood.") It's as if Mr. Spielberg had wanted to clear the stage for Mr. Rylance, who fills the relative silence with a performance that's similarly restrained and pointillist, characterized by a fixed gaze, and sagging shoulders and mouth that create a quizzical counterpoint to his raised brows and creased forehead. Abel looks like a defeated man, one whose passions fled long ago even as the occasional sharp flickers in his eyes indicate otherwise.
These early scenes with Abel are unwaveringly beautiful, filled with fine-grained production texture, like the white handkerchiefs draped across his cast-iron bed, the too-large jacket that makes this slight man look as if he were shrunk inside it, and the razor blade ("Made in USA") he uses to pry open the hollow nickel. He isn't the only character in these scenes — he's being tailed by F.B.I. agents who soon arrest him — but he might as well be. In foregrounding Abel, the movie insists on his primacy and his hold on it never eases even when Mr. Hanks, in a warm, generous turn, shows up as Donovan. As the story expands to include Powers (Austin Stowell) and Pryor (Will Rogers) it regularly circles back to Abel, whose double life means he's both the enemy and a good soldier.
Insistently dialectical, the movie is filled with such doubling, of seeming opposites who are set up as mirrors of each other: Abel and Donovan, Abel and Powers and, of course, the Soviet Union and the United States. This isn't a matter of forcing false equivalences (though, really, it will all be one big ash heap after nuclear Armageddon), but of posing philosophical questions and positing legal truths, like those that Donovan presents when he explains why he's defending Abel. He explains himself a lot, largely, it seems, for the benefit of the audience, as when he tells a C.I.A. operative with a German surname, Hoffman (an excellent Scott Shepherd, twitchy and steely), that it's the Constitution that makes them both American. It's as corny as an Iowa summer, corny enough to make you weep.
Throughout Mr. Spielberg plays subtly with different registers of realism, from the sweat-soured naturalism of Abel's apartment, where you can almost smell the neighbor's boiling potatoes, to the more cartoonish aspects of Donovan's family life and espionage encounters. The family is as picture-perfect and plastic as a 1950s sitcom (or a later Roy Lichtenstein canvas), with Amy Ryan dolled up as Mrs. Donovan in Donna Reed-style pearls, heels and a Pepsodent smile. Like the silhouetted dark figures that loom throughout, reverberating with intrigue and film-noir dread, Donovan's wife and children don't so much register as distinct individuals but as manifestations of an America that seems more and more unreal the closer Donovan gets to yet another double, East Berlin, with its haunted faces and streets.
With its scenes of prisoner abuse, arguments about American justice and all the cameras that telegraph the emergence of the surveillance state, "Bridge of Spies" suggests that the Cold War has its own twin in the war on terror. That's hardly controversial, yet it's something far too few filmmakers engage. In 1966, John le Carré, that great bard of the Cold War, responded to a Russian critic who said he had fanned its flames in his work, including "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold." Mr. le Carré countered that what concerned him was the cost, "in moral terms," to the West in its fight. "How long can we defend ourselves – you and we," he wrote, "by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?" A half-century later, Mr. Spielberg is asking the same question.
"Bridge of Spies" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Duck and cover!