If Do the Right Thing had the urgency of breaking news, Summer of Sam is history written in tabloid thunder. Appropriately, the movie is introduced by Jimmy Breslin, the Daily News columnist whose sparring with the serial killer dubbed "Son of Sam" gripped New York in '77. "There are 8 million stories in the naked city," intones Breslin, "and this is one of them." The quote connects Summer of Sam to the gritty, location-shot Mark Hellinger melodramas of the late 1940s, which helped fuse New York and crime in the public imagination.

Lee aims for that kind of pulpy immediacy in Summer of Sam, which recreates the sweltering summer that punk, disco, Reggie Jackson, riots, mass murder, mass media, and temperatures in the 100s converged to ignite the city's tensions. Shot in tints as hot and livid as lipstick by Ellen Kuras, Summer of Sam focuses on a single Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx, where the killer's threat has turned brunettes blond and turned anyone offbeat into a suspect. To the fellas who hang out with Joey T. (Michael Rispoli) by the Dead End sign, Suspect No. 1 is Ritchie, a punk who dares to wear spiked hair and dog collars.

Ritchie's buddy Vinny (John Leguizamo) starts out sticking up for him, but he's got problems of his own--he's convinced his womanizing ways have made him Son of Sam's next target, and his trusting disco-dolly wife Dionna (an astonishing Mira Sorvino) is wising up. As the heat, the hostility, and the body count rise, so does the vigilante fervor in the neighborhood--and with it the pressure on Vinny to side against his friend with the freaky 'do.

Lee's movies have been accused of a narrow, provincial worldview. But his films have a lot of sympathy for misfits who long to escape peer pressure, ingrained racism, and a world the size of a city block--even if they often take a beating for their curiosity. It's no accident here that his villain, gunman David Berkowitz (Michael Badalucco), is a shut-in who stews in his room until he pops--while the hero, Ritchie, played with scruffy gallantry by Adrien Brody, is the character most willing to explore life outside the 'hood.

Ritchie, like Do the Right Thing's Radio Raheem, is also a scary-looking outsider who turns out to be a lot less threatening than the normal folks around him--normal folks like the thuggish Joey T. and bland, doughy Berkowitz. To Lee, there's nothing more dangerous than always being normal; he repeatedly forces his neighborhood boys into situations where they get to be "the other" for a change, whether ogled by Bowery punks or snubbed by disco patrons.

Working with a brilliant cast and a juicy, sprawling script cowritten with actors Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, Lee creates a tapestry of city life in which mobsters share meals with cops, drug dealers appoint themselves crime fighters, and overheated restaurant workers take turns in a meat freezer. From greasy spoons to glittery Studio 54, the movie's portrait of New York 1977 is as double-edged and multifaceted as its characters, who worry about the warring sides of their personalities and assume different identities with wigs and accents.

The movie's worst scenes, oddly enough, involve Berkowitz: They're shot in a hammy green-tinted horror-movie style that ranges from tasteless to ludicrous. I don't buy the contention that making the movie is an automatic affront to the victims' families, but there's no denying the shootings are photographed for grisly frissons: When one victim holds a book in front of her face, you just know Lee can't resist showing the bullet blasting through the cover. When he stoops to dubbing the words "Help me!" over a fly in Berkowitz's apartment, maybe it's time for Lee to start making movies instead of "joints."

However, if Lee handles the killer and the killings with gratuitous ugliness, he treats Mira Sorvino's wronged wife and Jennifer Esposito's promiscuous punk-in-training with a tenderness and empathy all but unseen in his female characters. And if the wall-to-wall score of '70s tunes resorts sometimes to cheap irony, it also conveys the vortex of passions and events swirling around the movie's many characters.

Despite its violence, the film's affection for the city remains intact. Lee's visual rock 'n' roll culminates in two electrifying montages of mayhem set to Who classics; even so, the closing sweep of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" seems anything but ambiguous. In Summer of Sam, as in Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee shows his love for the urban melting pot, even when it turns into a pressure cooker.