Sorvino especially shines here, acting as the movie's human center -- a good dancer, good daughter, good wife, she keeps all the headline violence in check. The most gut-wrenching moment is not one of the many pointless, brutal shootings or the many pointless brawls. The most gut-wrenching moment is watching the happiness drain from Sorvino's face as she kisses her husband and tastes another woman on his lips.

Lee's ambitious approach is intensely democratic. His mosaic storytelling impulse, aided by his talent and ability at choosing singular actors, feels like what America is supposed to feel like. The citizens of his cities are not faceless, nameless representatives of the masses. They are unique individuals with personalities and quirks. That is why Lee's oeuvre sticks with the viewer in specific scenes rather than story arcs, moments such as Danny Aiello's bittersweet courting of the radiant Joie Lee in "Do the Right Thing," or Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry's memorable performances as crackheads in "Jungle Fever." This individualist collectivism is mirrored in his process, epitomized by the loving production credit on his movies, "A Spike Lee Joint," which means everything from operating independently to hiring your dad to write the musical score.

Considering that heat, New York City and Italian food are characters as much as the actors are, "Summer of Sam" plays like a companion piece to Lee's 1989 breakthrough, "Do the Right Thing." Of all Lee's characters over the years, the filmmaker himself seems most identifiable with one from that film -- Mother Sister as played by Ruby Dee. The elderly neighborhood matriarch sits in her window all day, witnessing. A matronly Santa Claus, she knows who's been bad and who's been good; omniscient, she's the director's double, the only figure in the neighborhood who can keep track of all the stories around her -- everyone else is too absorbed in his own little plot.

Both "Do the Right Thing" and "Summer of Sam" deal with how the frequently xenophobic village mindset of New York's neighborhoods butts against melting-pot realities. "Do the Right Thing," even more than his biopic about Malcolm X, made Lee into a lightning rod on race issues, specifically because of its climax, in which Mookie, the character played by Lee, ignites a street riot when he throws a garbage can through the window of the Italian pizzeria. A lot of reactionary punditry at the time feared the film's release because such an image would supposedly fuel real-life riots that, of course, never happened. In fact, watching that film 10 years later, it's only apparent how subtle it is -- how Lee indicts certain characters instead of certain races, how the most sympathetic character is Aiello's pizzeria owner, who is broken-hearted that the business he built with his bare hands went up in smoke, how only a few hours before the craziness of the altercation he'd been waxing to his racist son of his pride in feeding the generations of (black) people from the neighborhood. Lee was never an easy answer, famously ending the film with contradictory quotes -- Martin Luther King Jr. condemning violence and Malcolm X holding up certain forms of violence as self-defense. You could see such a contradiction as a cop-out, as a refusal to take a stand, but I like to think of it as the truth, which is to say as storytelling. Ultimately, Lee's films are never going to be about any one thing, race included. They're art, not politics, and the responsibility of art is to the story, to the image, to whatever the artist himself cares about.

Sure, Lee is famous for taking on big subjects like race and class and gender, but has anyone ever noticed how good he is at the metaphysics of hair? Like the moment in "Do the Right Thing" in which Sweet Dick Willie rolls his eyes when the goofily coiffed Buggin' Out suggests they boycott Sal's Famous Pizzeria because it only displays pictures of Italian-American icons on the wall. Says Willie, "What you ought to do is boycott that goddamn barber that fucked up your head." It's hardly a coincidence that such a cosmic cosmetologist as Lee assigned Leguizamo's character the occupation of hairdresser, or that he chose as his subject the Son of Sam himself, who targeted brunets with shoulder-length hair. When the brunets of New York start chopping their locks and dyeing them blond, Leguizamo's boss at the salon (Bebe Neuwirth) takes a stand: "Screw Son of Sam. I'm not cuttin' my hair."

When hair makes a statement, it becomes dangerous. If Sorvino's sweet Dionna (with whom her husband can only let down his hair when she dons a blond wig --"I feel like I'm cheating on you with you," he confesses) is the film's human heart, the punk rocker Richie (the charming Adrien Brody) is its moral compass. Forced to move back in with his parents in the Bronx after he's been evicted from his Manhattan apartment, the spiky-haired Richie, in a Union Jack T-shirt, is anathema to the neighborhood guys -- many of them minor mobsters -- he grew up with. Ruby, the neighborhood whore and Richie's future girlfriend, is clearly enthralled, asking him if he's been to London. "No," he replies in his best cockney accent, "but it's all in the attitude." Richie's purpose in the film is not subtle. He is different and as such is a symbol of difference. He gets the most philosophical dialogue: When Leguizamo's character chides him for wearing a dog collar around his neck, Richie retorts, "You're on a leash to a certain way of thinking."

Son of Sam's mania is just a framework. Especially through the punk Richie, Lee takes a stab at indicating the more mundane, daily varieties of violence that ultimately take on a more evil cast than does the shooting spree of a madman. "Summer of Sam" is ultimately about tolerance, but this being Spike Lee, the topic isn't couched in touchy-feely treacle, but rather exposed through dark humor. There are hilariously stupid moments involving the mobsters' suspicion that Richie is the Son of Sam because he has weird hair -- like when the men of respect squirm their way through CBGB's temple of punk, or the way one draws a portentous Mohawk on the head of a Son of Sam police sketch featured on the front page of the Daily News.

If all of the above sounds like 29 barely-held-together plots that are so relentless the audience members exit the theater touching their foreheads as if collectively appearing in an aspirin commercial, it is. I wouldn't schedule much afterwards, because if your aprhs "Summer of Sam" dinner is anything like mine, everyone at the table will be exhausted and argumentative, like temporary residents of Spike Lee's New York. It is that immediate. I felt like I wasn't watching it, I was in it. It was only later, like Mother Sister sitting in her window taking it all in, that I was able to pull back and absorb its scope, which is vast. Lee might make hard movies, even exasperating movies. But -- and I admire this -- they're never small.