This is the age of the blockbusters. Huge bombastic films with expensive effects and elaborate set pieces where the fate of the world is in peril from the forces of evil, and only a small band of heroes can save us from certain doom.

These are tales with global scale and universal peril. The terrorists must not get the nukes. The supervillain must not open the wormhole. The mad scientist must not complete his Super Death Ray.

These are not easy stories to tell. All of the pieces must fit together, the effects must be seamless, the cinematography dynamic. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people work together, and many millions of dollars are spent to create a single work of art. And still the result can be a flawed and disjointed mess.

But what happens when you take all of that away? What happens when you throw out the beautiful sets, do away with the special effects, and fire your superheroes?

What you have left is a movie like Locke. One man, in one location, dealing with a crisis so personal that the motorists he passes on the freeway as he drives couldn’t care less whether he succeeds or fails.

And telling that kind of story is harder still.

Here, there is no spectacle to distract us, no fight scene for us to cheer for; all we have left is drama.

“Drama” is a word that’s been simplified and bastardized to merely mean “exciting”, but there is so much more to it than that. Drama is that chemical reaction that happens in a story when when a character’s greatest inner strength is drawn into conflict.

That scene in the last season of Breaking Bad when Walt and Hank finally faced off in Hank’s garage? That was drama. No one was shot. No dinosaurs ate anyone. Cthulhu did not awake from his slumber. Instead it was about one man’s purpose being stymied by another. Hank’s indomitable will to bring his brother-in-law to justice coming into conflict with Walt’s threat to bring him down with him if he falls.

If the character’s principles are weak, or if the conflict does not clash with those principles convincingly, the drama is lost.

Locke may be the most dramatic film I’ve ever seen. The titular character is unbending in his principles, determined to live up to the ideal he has made for himself.

And as the story progresses, the challenges his he faces to keep that ideal intact grow exponentially. First his livelihood, then his family, and finally the work that he loves are all brought into peril by his decision to do what he believes is right and honorable, to right the wrongs he has done, to be the man that his father never was.

Ivan Locke is a bird in a hurricane, first buffeted, then grounded, but never deterred from his course by one inch.

This is Tom Hardy at his finest, not strutting about as a supervillain or raging through the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but breathing life into one extraordinary character.

Locke isn’t just determined. He’s broken. He’s spent his life resenting his father, building a shell of principles around himself in order to avoid being like the man that failed him. He is honest, literally to a fault, unwilling to bend the truth even to comfort the terrified mother of his bastard child as she goes into early labor.

And yet, in spite of these things, he is loved by his family and respected by his peers. This is a man they have all come to rely on. And when his world begins to fall apart, their worlds threaten to crumble along with it.

Doubtless this film is not for everyone. It is not particularly “fun”; it is even possible that some will find Ivan Locke’s actions and attitudes to be morally reprehensible. And maybe they aren’t wrong to think so.

But for my part this is a beautiful portrait of humanity, tragically flawed, yet incredibly strong, facing off against the everyday terrors of life.

This is a story about something more important than the fate of the world; it is story about the fate of one man’s soul.