‘You Were Never Really Here’ is good, maybe even great

The film is also hard to like.

Joaquin Phoenix assumes a hooded, bearlike presence in “You Were Never Really Here,” a disquieting urban thriller directed by Lynne Ramsay. As Joe, a taciturn hit man whose specialty is rescuing young women who have been abducted and forced into sex trafficking, Phoenix is a lurking, skulking bundle of anxieties and retributive obsession, a dangerous mash-up of Holden Caulfield’s beneficent alter ego in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Taxi Driver’s” haunted Travis Bickle.

In fact, “You Were Never Really Here,” adapted from a 2013 novel by Jonathan Ames, owes more than a passing debt to “Taxi Driver,” with which it shares an unsettling depiction of unresolved trauma, urban claustrophobia and male redemption predicated on female suffering. Ramsay makes bold, counterintuitive choices as a director, offering quiet interludes and quick, shardlike flashbacks by way of characterization.

Playing both protagonist and muse, Phoenix offers his bulked-out body as yet another canvas for clues to Joe’s clearly anguished past. The austerely pulled-back hair, the tattoos and prodigious scars, the private rites and rituals and bouts of explosive violence with a ball peen hammer (made in the U.S.A.) all suggest a primal unhealed wound and — when Joe is given the assignment to save Nina, the young daughter of a powerful New York politician — ultimate salvation.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay’s filmmaking and Phoenix’s central performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy “You Were Never Really Here” depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls. One person’s trope, after all, is another’s shopworn cliche. In many ways, “You Were Never Really Here” is just a tarted-up version of “Taken,” however artfully Ramsay has disguised and deconstructed its pulpy contours.

There’s no denying Ramsay’s artistry in “You Were Never Really Here,” which, like her 2011 film “We Need to Talk About Kevin” qualifies as a brilliant exercise in formalism and deeply psychological portraiture. Still, there’s also no escaping the fact that she has marshaled her gifts in service to a played-out story drenched in pseudo-angsty-macho wishfulfillment fantasies.

“You Were Never Really Here” is a good film, maybe even a great one. But I can’t honestly say that I liked it.