Starring Vincent Cassel, Gérard Depardieu, and Roy Dupuis. In French with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, August 20, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Jacques Mesrine is to France what John Dillinger is to the United States: its quintessential 20th-century criminal. Loosely based on L’Instinct de mort, the murderous bank robber’s defiantly immodest prison memoirs, the first half of this biographical two-parter takes us up to the point where Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) and Montreal associate Jean-Paul Mercier (Roy Dupuis) have just blasted two Québécois game wardens into the afterlife. It’s 1972 and the gangster’s violent career has another seven years to run, and director-cowriter Jean-Franí§ois Richet makes us want to see the second half of this diptych (Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1) before Mesrine: Killer Instinct’s credits have finished running.

This movie manages to seduce us with a mixture of abrasive acting, well-choreographed action, and a reasonably accurate apprehension of the recent past. Perhaps because Richet’s cowriter (Abdel Raouf Dafri) is himself of Algerian descent, no effort is made to downplay Mesrine’s anti-Arab racism. (Apparently, the gangster’s first victims were Algerian National Liberation Front prisoners, murdered while in military custody.) The Mesrine we see here is not the loner celebrated by the media but a man with many underworld associates, including Guido (Gérard Depardieu), a hulking godfather who is also a kingpin in the French terrorist group OAS.

As for Mesrine’s legendary appeal to women, Cassel makes us realize it’s largely because this guy doesn’t just look like a bad boy but acts like one, too. Indeed, not the least of this biopic’s many charms is its unabashed admiration for the unashamedly hard-boiled. Slyly, insidiously, it reduces our desires to one: what happens next?