Last week, director Michael Mann’s Academy Award hopes certainly brightened for his newest film, The Insider, as it nabbed three awards from the L.A. Film Critics Association and garnered a notice from the National Board of Review. Whether the movie will prove to be a contender come Oscar time is not important now, but what should be highlighted is the craft of Mann, who is not often mentioned in the upper echelon of current American directors (i.e., Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, etc.), but should very well be put there pronto.

Mann came to prominence in the ’80s with his innovations in the TV genre with the ground-breaking crime drama, Miami Vice. He followed that with the underrated film, Manhunter, an adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel, and, still unbeknownst to many, the first big-screen appearance of Hannibal Lecter (played by Brian Cox). From there, the bar on his potential — and on our expectations — kept being raised and met with successive efforts, The Last of the Mohicans and Heat. Now, Mann scores again with The Insider, a gripping drama based on a real-life battle between Big Tobacco and a former cigarette company employee, but is more generally about truth-telling in our society and its potential consequences.

Russell Crowe stars as Jeffrey Wigand, a research scientist for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, who is unceremoniously dumped from his post and forced to sign a confidentiality pact about what he can and cannot share with outsiders. Wigand fully intends to honor this contract, but when he gets strong-armed by B&W bigwigs, his dander is raised and he turns to 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) to explore his options on blowing the roof on the tobacco industry’s nasty little secrets.

A husband and father of two, Wigand is no crusading hero of unending means. His family had adjusted to the lifestyle afforded by his corporate job but now must not only scale back, but also concern themselves with mounting bills for an asthmatic child no longer covered by a comprehensive medical plan. As Bergman battles, using all available resources to make it possible for Wigand to sit with dogged top-dog correspondent Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), Wigand’s personal life crumbles amid the intensifying resistance of personal threats, legal posturing and broad-stroke smear campaigns.

Mann, working with co-screenwriter Eric (Forrest Gump) Roth, fashions an intriguing and surprisingly suspenseful tale based on events from 1995 in which Wigand found himself courted by CBS News officials who would later find themselves buckling under pressure when the threat of a potential lawsuit — and its implications for a network up for sale at the time — gave them motive to pull the plug on Wigand’s on-air interview. It’s a wonderfully thorny situation which throws all manner of legal mumbo jumbo and rigmarole into the mix of what is, at heart, an issue of one’s willingness — whether that “one” be an individual or a corporation — to tell the truth, whatever the consequences.

Helping to power Mann’s rewarding and provoking psychological drama are strong performances throughout the film, but particularly notable are Crowe, Pacino and Plummer. Crowe, almost unrecognizable from his turn in L.A. Confidential, proves to be a major talent, not just by his chameleon-like nature, but his ability to inhabit the skin of an everyman fighting to do the noble, right thing; Pacino is justly controlled and sound as a hard-nosed, yet ethical producer swimming in increasingly choppy waters; and Plummer is scene-stealingly good as an arrogant, mercurial and sharp-witted Wallace.

The Insider is rated R for raw dialogue and complex subject matter.