Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is part of a team that defuses bombs in Iraq in Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker. (Summit Entertainment)

Audiences haven’t exactly bum-rushed theatres to catch the first wave of movies about Iraq. One could sniffily declare this to be another sign of our gutter-bound cultural decline, a resistance to all things more complicated than the Jonas Brothers. On the other hand, perhaps movies about Iraq just haven’t been that good yet. Stop-Loss (2008) and Jarhead (2005) were dully generic; Redacted and Lions for Lambs (both 2007) yowled with specificity and felt more like pieces of campus protest theatre than movies.

The Hurt Locker is set in Baghdad in 2004, during the last days of a tour of duty by an Explosive Ordinance Disposal team. In other words, a bomb squad.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is the rare – perhaps the first – fictional film about Iraq that people might actually want to see. As a director, Bigelow knows a thing or two about what people want, having forged her reputation as a stylish, often exhilarating director with Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995). She distinguishes herself from her peers by a simple insistence on clarity. In Bigelow’s action sequences, you can see who’s who and where’s where, even as she sets off the requisite big-bang turn-on. In the ‘80s, she was a visual artist, which may be why she knows where to place her characters: she has the great spatial sense of a painter.

But her energy has sometimes been more impressive than her sense of story. Her weakest film was the flat-footed Cold War submarine movie K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), in which Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford played glowering Russians, delivering platitudes between explosions. But The Hurt Locker is Bigelow’s most dramatically ambitious work thus far, benefiting from a fascinating screenplay by journalist Mark Boal, who was once embedded in Iraq.

The film is set in Baghdad in 2004, during the last days of a tour of duty by an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team. The insurgency is upon the bomb squad, and the war is stealthy, simmering. The hot brown landscape (Jordan stands in for Iraq) makes everything murky; bombs and people are shrouded in dust.

The trio of bomb techs moves from one job to the next. Cautious, cerebral Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) calms jittery Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). The most integral point on the triangle is Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), the guy who snips the wires on the bombs that seem to be tucked in every corner of the city. He’s been parachuted in from Afghanistan after the old leader (Guy Pearce) exploded. James’s clock-racing work requires him to be strapped into a protective suit so thick and cumbersome it makes NASA moon gear look skimpy. But confronted with a trunk load of phallic bombs parked outside a UN building in Baghdad, James takes off his fishbowl headgear. “If I’m gonna die,” he explains. “I’m gonna die comfortable.”

Unlike Eldridge, James doesn’t sense death, and death reciprocates. He has defused over 800 bombs, keeping little pieces of them as macabre souvenirs under his bed. He has a bit of the cowboy untouchability of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, sniffing the napalm as the beach blows up.

Defusing bombs in Baghdad is a dangerous job, as evidenced by this scene from The Hurt Locker. (Summit Entertainment)

But on the field, this war has little in common with any war that came before. There is no soldier-to-soldier combat, no front lines – no lines at all. Iraqis appear in windows and on ledges as the men do their work – friends or enemies? The film wrings awesome tension out of this uncertainty. A young man in a billowing scarf runs up to the soldiers asking, “Where you from? California?” The question drives Eldridge to a point of near hysteria as he screams at the guy to leave. The movie deeply feels the sheer disorientation of life at ground level; at times, it’s almost comical. A soldier is standing there, then poof, a bomb goes off, and he’s vanished in a puff of smoke, like Wile E. Coyote. The men might as well be wearing blindfolds in a shooting gallery, and yet they are heroic — good at what they do, and dedicated to doing it, no patriotic rhetoric required.

The film never wanders into the greater discourse about the rationale for this war; it’s on, and here’s the mess, and here are the soldiers tasked to handle it. Instead of a treatise, The Hurt Locker examines the relationship between soldiers, particularly the initial wary circling of Sanborn and James, how their trust slowly builds, through drunken, animal wrestling and dangerous afternoons together under the melting sun.

On one endless day of flies and searing heat, the men sit on a ridge, staking out a possible group of insurgents. James calls out for a juice. He gets it, and then fumbles with the straw, his heavy gear inhibiting every gesture. When he finally succeeds in stabbing the container open with his straw, he silently passes it to his fellow soldier. It’s a small, concise moment that shows not just how men look out for one another, but why James is a good leader, and maybe even a good person. He develops a relationship with a boy hocking DVDs near the base – “I hook you up!” The relationship takes James into a Baghdad he’s never seen, in a terrifying sequence that ends up deflating his signature cockiness.

James may be addicted to the thrill, but Bigelow doesn’t condemn him for it. She respects the adrenaline rush that must be a part of the attraction to the military. A brief scene of the genius bomb tech back at home in the U.S. – as he jiggles his infant son and cleans the gutters – captures the tedium of his real life. Renner delivers a great performance, filled with surprise and wit, in a film at once explosive and expansive, an action movie – and an Iraq movie – of great purpose.

The Hurt Locker opens July 10.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.