Has a director ever had a more apt name than Michael Mann? Throughout his career he’s always made films about capital-M Men, and not in the casually chauvinist way of most Hollywood fare that takes maleness as a default setting for protagonists. His films are all about men, and what it means to be masculine. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that this sounds like the last thing you’d want to watch. Don’t we have enough art about manliness? But incredibly, and against all odds, all his films are also immensely compelling and thoughtful. Watching a Mann film makes you forget that you’ve been force-fed stories about men for your entire life.

Mann’s masculinity is unusual in a number of ways, but they all come back to interiority. Most stories about men are about being assailed from the outside, struggling against exterior foes. We are rarely allowed emotional access to these characters, because these works associate having interior lives with femininity. Men act, women react. To react is to feel, and to feel is to be feminine. Mann’s films have no such fear of emotion. One of his earliest films, Manhunter, is premised on a protagonist who has a preternatural ability to empathize. Will Graham, played by William Petersen, is a retired FBI criminal profiler who is brought back into the fold to track a serial killer called the Tooth Fairy. Graham’s capacity to get inside the heads of murderers made him good at his job, but the work left him emotionally scarred. The film never suggests that he is less of a man for his emotional gifts or the resultant trauma. He is a hero precisely because he can feel, just as the Tooth Fairy is a villain because he cannot. Will Graham became a template for Mann protagonists going forward. These men tend to be the best at their particular job, yet so consumed by it as to suffer emotional trauma.

William Petersen in Manhunter

The empathy of Mann’s protagonists shows up in his camera, too. All his films show a respect for dead characters, lingering with them much longer than other filmmakers might. He has a deep concern for the humanity of everyone on screen. No one is there just to die for the audience’s amusement, they’re all people with lives and souls. For comparison, look at a film like Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge. I mean, don’t look at it, don’t watch that film. Just take my word for it. The characters in Hacksaw Ridge exist only to die, and to die epically and brutally. They are mannequins for carnage and gore. Gibson doesn’t see them as people, he sees them as props. Mann is often considered a macho filmmaker, but his visual compassion sets him apart from the Gibsons of the world.

At the end of Manhunter, Graham collapses into his wife’s arms after his harrowing ordeal. “Most of them made it,” he says, tears in his eyes. There is no celebration of his victory, just a bittersweet acknowledgement that he couldn’t save everyone. Mann refuses to end the film on a fist-pumping heroic note. After all that brutal violence, how could there be any true triumph?

There is little glory in success for Mann’s men, and even less reward. At the end of The Insider, after his expose on the tobacco industry is finally allowed to be aired, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) doesn’t celebrate. He quits. He may have gotten what he wanted, but the road he took to get there has ruined his reputation. How, he asks, could any whistleblower trust him with their story after such an ordeal? Meanwhile, whistleblower Jeffery Wigand (Russell Crowe) doesn’t happily reunite with his wife and children. His life was blown apart, and it can’t be put back together by the end. Heat and Miami Vice don’t end with their police protagonists being awarded medals for heroism. Like Manhunter, both conclude on melancholy notes of appreciation for the simple fact of their survival and mourning for those who didn’t make it.