Perhaps you know him as the unkempt, fast food-looting leader of the underground resistance in "Demolition Man" (1993). Or maybe you remember him as the down-on-his-luck police detective - who manages to both lose Catherine Zeta-Jones and come off as less appealing than the real bad guy - in "The Thomas Crown Affair" (1999).
If none of these ring a bell, then surely you must have seen him as the booze-swilling, self-destructive Detective Mike McNeil in the short-lived TV series, "The Job" (2001).
Whoever you associate with the wonderfully ambivalent Denis Leary, one thing is clear, he isn't a very "good" good guy on screen.
His latest project, "Rescue Me," on cable's newly renovated FX, is more of the same from the actor/comedian.
"Rescue Me" (co-created by Leary and Peter Tolan) tells the story of the fictional Manhattan Engine Company 62 - which can't seem to get over Sept. 11.
The survivors suffer from a nasty case of survivor's guilt that manifests itself in a variety of ways: some cases are more serious than others.
The middle-aged smart aleck, Lieutenant Shea (John Scurti) - not one to publicly divulge his feelings - secretly composes Sept. 11 poetry in his basement. Meanwhile, his boss, the tough as nails Chief Reilly (Jack McGee, a retired firefighter in his own right), is a compulsive gambler who stoops so low as to conduct an office betting pool on whether one of his guys' will divorce his wife or not.
But, neither of these men is as deeply scarred as Leary's Tommy - who lost his cousin and best friend, Jimmy, to the tragedy. When Tommy isn't rushing into burning skyscrapers or leaping across building tops, he swallows his guilt from a flask he keeps in his car.
When it comes to his personal life, Tommy is your standard self-defeater. He compromises the goodwill that he has for his soon to be ex-wife (at the moment, they're separated) by spying on her through their kids. And as if that weren't enough: he's sleeping with Jimmy's widow after a botched but well-intentioned attempt to console her.
Tommy's propensity for setting metaphorical fires while he puts out the real ones is an irony that doesn't escape Leary in his portrayal of the firefighter. During those scenes when the firefighter is busy saving the day, Leary injects his character with an unhealthy dose of reckless arrogance.
A good example of this comes in the middle of the twelfth episode when a careless Tommy, who couldn't wait thirty seconds for his buddy with the ladder, leaps twenty feet onto a building top to save a little girl. In a scene that could have easily become just another heroic rescue sequence, Leary plays Tommy the firefighter like a guy who seems - dare I say it - ambitious in his work.
All of this amounts to a bold and potentially controversial portrayal of a profession that has come to be associated with heroic perfection.
In a post-Sept. 11 world in which our televisions and our movie screens feed us images of fearless urban warriors charging into burning buildings, firefighters often seem as if they don't deal with the same worries and concerns that consume the lives of normal human beings. Recent dramas depicting firefighters like the no frills "Third Watch" and the newly released "Ladder 49," give little indication that the events of Sept. 11 ever happened at all.
But as "Rescue Me" proves again and again, adulation may be exactly what our heroes do not need.
In a scene that smacks of the real life refusal of a number of firefighters to seek counseling after Sept. 11, the men of Engine 62 walk out on a psychologist who is brought in to treat them. Tommy, the only one to stick around, rhapsodizes a speech on behalf of his wounded buddies who listen from the hallway. His words are so elegant and unreal that you almost forget there ever was a shrink, or a show for that matter.
In what may be the most poignant chapter (episode 12) of the series so far, three Massachusetts firefighters make a pilgrimage to New York City to pay their respects, but somehow, in the process, manage to very nearly burn down the firehouse. It's an eerie metaphor for our own potentially disastrous commemoration and also stands as the point, at which you start asking yourself who, if anyone, will rescue the rescuers?
"Rescue Me" is clearly Leary's baby and the closing credits reveal that he is indeed one of the show's primary writers, its executive producer and of course, the show's star.
Not surprisingly, it is also a masterpiece of ambivalence. These characters that Leary has wrought are remarkably three-dimensional and disastrously human. They are people you've met in the supermarket or perhaps (more accurately) at the pub down the street. And maybe they've had too much to drink at this pub - maybe they've even started a fight - but none of this changes what they have to go out and do in the morning.
