Joan Allen plays an intemperate, ill-tempered, self-pitying wreck of a woman in “The Upside of Anger,” and it is — not coincidentally — the most appealing performance of her career. Never has the regal, reed-thin actress (“The Contender,” “The Ice Storm”) been funnier, more genuine or more deliciously unleashed.

Written and directed by Hollywood journeyman Mike Binder (“The Sex Monster”), “Anger” is a tragicomic tale of midlife anguish in which universal contempt — as it did in Neil LaBute's “In the Company of Men” (1995) — becomes a sort of resident syntax. Abandoned by her husband, upscale Detroit housewife Terry Wolfmeyer (Allen) promptly mutates into a bitter, acid-tongued harpie. Sucking down a never-ending armada of Grey Goose and tonics, Terry wallows in resentment and snipes at her four attractive, increasingly fed-up daughters, played by Erika Christensen (“Traffic”), Keri Russell (“Felicity”), Evan Rachel Wood (“Thirteen”) and Alicia Witt (“Dune”).
Terry is nothing if not dramatic. “I want the benefit of the doubt at every turn!” she proclaims woundedly, suggesting that her behavior is completely justified. Or so she believes.

To a certain extent, we believe it, too, which frees us to enjoy her rampage as accessories to the fact. Allen — with her imperious, porcelain beauty — is hilariously menacing; when Terry fixes a murderous, laser-beam gaze on her daughter's aging clown of a boyfriend (Binder, self-directed), you can almost feel it boring holes in his skull. Allen, whose work here is certainly sound enough to weather the nine months until Oscar season, also affects displeasure through the novel use of her neck tendons, which flare out like yacht rigging in her most volcanic moments. Scary.

Anger without solace isn't drama — it's a grease fire — so fortunately Terry finds a little in Denny Davies, a neighbor and retired baseball star played by a surprisingly sincere Kevin Costner (“Bull Durham”). Obviously, doing the affable jock thing is hardly a stretch for Costner, but here, working out of the bullpen, his mechanics suddenly appear more sound. Suffering through his own middle-age malaise, Denny is probably the biggest loser Costner has ever played, which is to say, the most vulnerable and recognizably human.

Ultimately, Denny helps bring Terry's buried humanity to the surface, both through gestures of friendship and shrew-taming displays of romantic certainty.

Binder's writing tends toward the didactic (yes, anger is self-destructive, we get it) and his dramatic choices are a bit hollow (a funeral foreshadow tells us that someone dies; he plays it for irony instead of grief) but the director gets high marks simply for giving good actors good roles to inhabit — none more so than Allen. Handed the juiciest role of her career, Hollywood's long-denied housemarm squeezes it for all it's worth.

MOVIE REVIEW
‘The Upside of Anger’
Grade: B+
Starring: Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell
Rating: R (language, sexual situations, brief comic violence and some drug use)
Running time: 118 min.
Playing: Opens Friday in Valley theaters