A row of knives is laid out on cloth like a surgeon’s instruments, and a man in a checked waistcoat and a stovepipe hat names each blade as if reciting scripture. Behind him stands a city that no longer exists and never quite looked like this — the Five Points of Lower Manhattan, its mud lanes and leaning tenements raised whole on a backlot outside Rome. Gangs of New York opens in that built world and rarely leaves it, because the world is the argument.

Martin Scorsese had wanted to make this film for some twenty years, and the wanting shows in every plank. The story is a revenge plot — a young Irishman, Amsterdam Vallon, comes back to the slum to kill the nativist butcher who murdered his father — but its real subject is a country being founded in blood, the moment when the word “American” was still settled with cleavers in the street. The private vendetta keeps getting swallowed by something larger: the draft, the riots, the war underneath the war.

The city Dante Ferretti built

Production designer Dante Ferretti raised the Five Points on the lots of Cinecittà in Rome — a whole quarter of nineteenth-century Manhattan in timber and mud, lit by Michael Ballhaus in firelight and smoke. The detail is obsessive and tactile: rotting wood, layered grime, an apron stiff with use. Howard Shore’s score slides from fiddle to drone, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing keeps the brawls legible even at their most chaotic. The craft is not backdrop; it carries the film’s claim that history is a physical thing, made by hand and paid for in bodies.

Bill the Butcher

And then there is Daniel Day-Lewis. As Bill “the Butcher” Cutting — nativist warlord, knife-thrower, self-crowned king of the Points — he gives one of the great screen performances, a coil of charm and menace assembled from a glass eye, a flattened old-New-York drawl, and a stillness that goes off without warning. He is so complete that he exposes the film around him: Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Amsterdam is earnest but outmatched, and Cameron Diaz‘s pickpocket is stranded in a romance the script never makes time for. Whenever the Butcher leaves the frame, you feel the floor drop.

The film walked into the 2003 Oscars with ten nominations and walked out with nothing — a clean shutout that became its own small legend, the price of a project fought over in the cutting room by its producer, Harvey Weinstein. What survives the interference is the scale and the face: a vision of how the city was actually made that no American film had attempted, anchored by a performance people still quote. It is messy and magnificent in the same breath, and the magnificence wins.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002), directed by Martin Scorsese — Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill “the Butcher” Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002).

Why it earns the score

The flaws are real and they are structural. The revenge plot is the least interesting thing in a film bursting with history; the third act hurries the Draft Riots into the background of one man’s grudge, and the romance barely registers. Those limits keep it out of the top tier. But the world is total, the central performance is for the ages, and the ambition — to film the violent birth of a city most movies pretend was always there — is honest and singular. It works as spectacle, as history, and, every time the Butcher speaks, as something close to great.

Gangs of New York was released in 2002, directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan, loosely based on Herbert Asbury’s 1928 chronicle of the same name. It was photographed by Michael Ballhaus, designed by Dante Ferretti, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and scored by Howard Shore. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, Brendan Gleeson and Liam Neeson, runs 167 minutes, and earned ten Academy Award nominations without a single win.