Starring Chris Cooper, Ryan Phillippe, and Laura Linney. Rated PG.

Using a macro lens as focused as Robert De Niro’s brush was broad in The Good Shepherd, writer-director Billy Ray hones in on one spectacular, real-life breakdown in the intelligence game.

Ray also looked at delusional mendacity in Shattered Glass, about a reporter who made shit up to make himself look good when he could have just done the work. FBI lifer Robert Hanssen (a saturnine Chris Cooper) was no slouch; in fact, he was such a brilliant intelligence analyst that he made a game of deceiving all around him, selling precious high-level secrets to his supposed enemy. Maybe his superiors should have thought to give him that corner office he secretly craved.

A devout Catholic somewhere to the right of Mel Gibson’s father, Hanssen was a devoted family man who also showed friends tapes of himself having sex with his wife (played with Stepford-like adulation by Kathleen Quinlan). This kink was the window through which the bureau slipped rookie Eric O’Neill, here portrayed by Ryan Phillippe, whose handsome blandness works well for him in his best performance yet. Like Hanssen, we are taken in by his harmlessness.

Initially, O’Neill—himself descended from a long line of Catholic military men—is ignorant of his true mission. And he is torn between admiration of his stern, religion-pushing new boss and the concerns of his loving wife (Quebec’s Caroline Dhavernas, delivering something like her real potential), who, in a fascinating real-life twist, is from East Germany. Actually, O’Neill himself is pretty freaked out by the ease with which he slips into a life of hastily improvised deception.

The carefully crafted film, which Ray cowrote with Adam Mazer and William Rotko, centres on the period of changeover from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush—a triumphal time for angry white men but also an event leading to a massive purge of professionalism in every sector. The FBI is presented as being ideology-neutral, mainly because its culture of masculine gun worship has never gone into abeyance. Hanssen appears to hate pantsuits on women even more than he despises “faggots” and Communism.

Of course, the fact that he earned millions from the KGB and its successors presented an irony that only the master spy himself may fully have understood. Or maybe not. He didn’t know that his main nemesis in the mole hunt was a pantsuit wearer, played by Laura Linney at her most hard-nosed, in one of the many complexities that make Breach the most thoughtful thriller of the year.

As a personality, Hanssen makes a chilling Cold War counterpart to the Stasi agent in The Lives of Others, whose encounter with mortal frailty helps him find his own humanity. Like Richard Nixon, who famously dragged Henry Kissinger to his knees in the Oval Office, Hanssen couldn’t stand to pray alone.