Who doesn’t love Joan Allen, the best actress working today, who rarely gets the chance to strut her considerable gifts front and center in a commercial film? Allen has been making movies for over two decades and has played a full spectrum of fascinating women, from an unsuspecting blind object of a serial killer’s affection in Manhunter, to a scandalized presidential candidate in The Contender. It’s her put upon supporting wives that have always garnered the most attention, however. From Nixon’s Pat to The Ice Storm’s deprived 70s house-waif, to The Crucible’s Goody Proctor, she excels at harnessing—then releasing—the pent-up subjugation and inner fire of the wife as disposable extension.

In a role that plays like a career summation of Allen’s frustrated wives unleashed as a suburban Tsunami that blankets everyone in its wake, The Upside of Anger finds Allen—looking and performing at a career high—in full command of her powers. Allen’s forty-something Terry Wolfmeyer, the sarcastic, hard-edged, hard-drinking upper class suburban Detroit matriarch finds herself suddenly and abruptly abandoned by an adulterous husband. She struggles to put her life back together while raising four very different teenaged daughters. She’s an intelligent, adult woman grappling with booze, depression, identity and a newfound romance with an equally confused drinking buddy and ex baseball star (Kevin Costner), also at the end of the line, and you get an idea of just how fully-formed and dimensional Terry Wolfmeyer is. In a career performance, Allen doesn’t miss a note.

Newly single Terry wastes no time hitting the sauce and straight-shooting with her girls about their father’s quick exit. She’s steeped in anger, drunk, and her four daughters—young teen "Popeye" (Evan Rachel Wood), would-be ballerina Emily (Keri Russell), free-spirited Andy (Erika Christiansen) and collegiate eldest Hadley (Alicia Witt)—take turns staying out of her way, while being chastised, ordered and otherwise challenged by their mother’s newfound anger.

A kindred spirit is found in neighbor Denney Davies (an excellent Kevin Costner), a fellow heavy drinker and ex-baseball star now relegated to a has-been radio show, who obviously feels for shut-down Terry and is able to alternately attract and repulse her into a sexual and later emotionally meaningful connection. It’s easy to forget how likeable Costner’s light touch can be in romantic comedies, and here he’s an appealing even keel to Teri’s manic tantrums.

In a number of excellent dramatic scenes, many of which are dinner-table showdowns (including one fantasy sequence of an exploding head that’s right on target), writer-director Mike Binder (who also plays an aging radio producer in a sexual fling with liberated daughter Andy), tightens the screws to Allen’s Terry. Her reactions are pain laced with humor, diffused by helpless sarcasm.

Standout scenes include the college graduation that reveals an engagement and its subsequent celebratory dinner; a Costner monologue about life’s disillusionment; Allen’s reaction to a potential family health crisis; a reception confrontation that stings (literally) and Costner physically busting down a door to get to closed-off Terry. And then there’s Allen’s actor’s moment—a reaction to a late-film revelation that forces an examination of everything else in the picture.

The Upside of Anger, the first good, maybe even great film of 2005, is many things¾ showcase for the marvelous Allen, who looks glamorous and perfectly preserved, and a career comeback for Costner. It’s also a well-written examination of how anger can separate and then unify a family, a look at how healing sneaks in through the back door against our own will, how parental love can inadvertently suffocate mothers and daughters, and how misperceptions can distort a life.

It’s a credit to writer-director-actor Binder that the film has such an uncanny ear for the five very different women in the Wolfmeyer household. Each is written with complexity and unpredictability, each a different young woman coming into her own, sometimes against the will of a demonstrative mother challenging her every move.

It’s an intelligent film that dares to put a mature couple with real problems in its line of sight, with no pat answers, trivial hijinks or commercial antics. Like its top-notch actress and defiant heroine, it’s articulate and uncompromising. A jewel.