I was not among the fans of SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Surprisingly, because I have long been a fan of its director David O Russell.

It was an ok movie but not a knockout and besides Noah Baumbach had made a very similar and far better movie called GREENBERG the year before.

 The year before, Russell punched me, and audiences around the world, in the mouth with THE FIGHTER, the film that garnered Academy awards for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo as well as a nomination for Amy Adams.

Russell gets another two knockout performances from Bale and Adams in his latest triumph, AMERICAN HUSTLE (M).

This retro crime cum con comedy also reunites Silver Linings Playbook alumni Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro.

There is a plot, there is a story, but it’s the devilish detail of the characterisations that defines this picture and raises it to masterpiece cult status.

Bale’s Irving Rosenfeld is a conman with a heart and chutzpah more colossal than his comb-over, a monumental follicular folly, the magnificent  manufacture of which proves a mesmerising opener to the film.

Indeed, hair apparent is a major concern for all the leading characters and a major motif of the movie.

Cooper’s character crinkles his locks into curly permanent, Lawrence teases her tresses and Jeremy Renner sports an impressive pompadour.

Adams boasts big hair too as well as plunging necklines, cleavage and décolletage a trade mark of her sophisticated sting slinger.

Set in the Seventies, AMERICAN HUSTLE brilliantly recreates the era – even the production company logos and the titles evoke the period – and the fashion and the music are expertly embroidered into the fabric of the film. Lawrence lights up the scene lip synching ‘Live and Let Die’ in a house cleaning frenzy.

“Some of this is true” we are told at the commencement of the film, demonstrating fact is stranger than fiction, but there is certainly a high level of imagination in David Russell’s production, from script through performance and production values.

Already an award winner taking the New Yorks Critics gong, AMERICAN HUSTLE is sure to rustle up a swag of nominations and appear on many Best Film of the Year lists.  It’s on mine.