We need movies, perhaps especially feature films, to grab onto what is floating around in the air, throw it up on the screen and make us look at how we live now. After September 11, in response to that devastating and shocking act of violence, the things that we have in common seemed more powerful than our differences. We put aside differences to work out how we could triumph over such stunning hatred. At the movies, we wanted escapist fantasies and comfort movies.

Those days are behind us. We are sufficiently past, if not recovered from that tragedy to be asking questions. Why are things the way they are? And why aren’t they any better than they are? And we are angry that, after all that we’ve been through things aren’t any more comprehensible than they used to be. We have the same nagging problems we had before September 11, and plenty of new ones too.

Crash addresses old problems - racism, intolerance, gun violence, a lack of safety in urban neighborhoods, drug abuse, poverty, immigration - and looks at them through a lens that includes the shadings that September 11 have brought to life in the United States. Crash takes place in Los Angeles, the American city that in the last 20 years has overtaken New York as the cinematic location for films that address the issues that haunt our society. Crash shows us the intertwining lives of a rainbow of characters who bump into each others lives through car accidents.

Real art expresses truths that are tricky to articulate. And Crash is real art. It is also a gripping entertainment, but it is unmistakable that the filmmaker and everyone involved in this production were hoping for more than popcorn sales. Crash wants you to think and walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes. It isn’t pretty art; if Crash were a painting you wouldn’t want it hanging over your couch.

Crash may not be great art. It so insistently creates a sense of immediacy that it may not look so good in a few years. Maybe, finally, we will learn to just get along. (I’m kidding.) Grand Canyon and Short Cuts, two movies that showed us Los Angeles in turmoil about the time of the Rodney King beating, still look good to me, but I remember those times. Seeing those movies when they were released, I had the same uncomfortable tingling that Crash provokes. And it gives me a shiver to think that, while Haggis and company were making this movie, someone was rising to the level of crazy that now, as the movie hits theaters, is on an extended freeway shooting spree.

If Crash isn’t great, it is very good. I haven’t seen a movie this year that had me at the edge of my seat while I was watching it and has kept me thinking about it afterward so persistently.

Crash isn’t subtle. It is a blunt instrument and proud of it. It is gleeful in its speeches that let characters spit racial stereotypes at each other with venom. If the message of the film wasn’t so insistent that all people are a mix of good and bad, and that we are ñ none of us - even close to perfect, the abundant racial profiling wouldn’t get by the political correctness police.

Crash is full of powerful performances from actors and actresses who, even when they are playing up stereotypes or against them, infuse their roles with tremendous passion. Matt Dillon’s performance is perhaps my favorite. He is a racist cop who harasses a well-to-do African-American couple because he can, takes care of his ill father and exhibits tremendous courage and sense of duty. He makes every emotion, despite the wide variation of experience, utterly believable.

Larenz Tate and Ludacris are car-jacking thieves, but we like them in spite of that. Hearing Ludacris slam rap music as a white racist plot is very funny. Don Cheadle has family problems, relationship issues with his partner (played by Jennifer Esposito) and has a fine line to walk as a black cop in Los Angeles. Trying to be the good white cop gets Ryan Phillippe into more trouble than he can imagine.

Shaun Toub, playing an Iranian store owner, is Persian and proud of it. He is not an Arab but is sinking under the weight of being hated for being something he is not. Being called Osama is an insult he cannot tolerate.

Michael Pena is a Mexican-American who only wants to do his work and protect his family. Thandie Newton and Terrence Dashon Howard fight about who between them is more black, and what that means.

Crash is not a movie that lets you off easy. It is demanding and manipulative, but you leave feeling grateful that it put you through some tough stuff.

Watching a movie like Crash in Fort Wayne is an odd experience. In Los Angeles, people who distrust each other live in such close quarters, they can’t help bumping into each other. In Fort Wayne, people who distrust each other live pretty separate lives in mostly separate neighborhoods. But the distrust is still there, and much more widespread than we like to admit. Sandra Bullock, the privileged wife of Brendan Fraser who plays the District Attorney, says to her friend on the phone “I’m angry all the time, and I don’t know why.”

Crash brazenly suggests that if you’re really alive and participating in the world, anger is a logical response. But Crash also hammers home the point that no good can come from giving in to anger.