'The New York Times'The film 12 Years a Slave isn't the first movie about slavery in the United States - but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it's been hawking for more than a century.

Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It's at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood - the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations and their genteel manners - are the backdrop for an outrage .

The story opens with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) already enslaved and cutting sugar cane on a plantation. A series of flashbacks shifts the story to an earlier time, when Solomon, living in New York with his wife and children, accepts a job from a pair of white men to play the violin in a circus. Soon the three are enjoying a civilized night out in Washington, sealing their camaraderie with heaping plates of food, flowing wine and the unstated conviction - if only on Solomon's part - of a shared humanity, a fiction that evaporates when he wakes the next morning shackled and discovers that he's been sold. Thereafter, he is passed from master to master.

It's a desperate path and a story that seizes you almost immediately with a visceral force. But McQueen keeps everything moving so fluidly and efficiently that you're too busy worrying about Solomon, following him as he travels from auction house to plantation, to linger long in the emotions and ideas that the movie brings up.

Unlike most of the enslaved people whose fate he shared for a dozen years, the real Northup was born into freedom. (His memoir's telegraphing subtitle is Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana. ) That made him an exceptional historical witness, because even while he was inside slavery - physically, psychologically, emotionally - part of him remained intellectually and culturally removed, which gives his book a powerful double perspective.

In the North, he experienced some of the privileges of whiteness, and while he couldn't vote, he could enjoy an outing with his family. Even so, he was still a black man in antebellum America.

There's nothing ambivalent about Solomon. Ejiofor has a round, softly inviting face, and he initially plays the character with the stunned bewilderment of a man who, even chained, can't believe what is happening to him. Not long after he's kidnapped, Solomon sits huddles with two other prisoners on a slaver's boat headed south. One man insists that they should fight their crew. A second disagrees, saying, "Survival's not about certain death, it's about keeping your head down." Seated between them, Solomon shakes his head no. Days earlier he was home. "Now," he says, "you tell me all is lost?" For him, mere survival cannot be enough. "I want to live."

This is Solomon's own declaration of independence, and an assertion of his humanity that sustains him. It's also a seamlessly structured scene that turns a discussion about the choices facing enslaved people into cinema.

In large part, 12 Years a Slave is an argument about American slavery that, in image after image, both reveals it as a system (signified in one scene by the sights and ominous, mechanical sounds of a boat water wheel) and demolishes its canards , myths and cherished symbols. There are no lovable masters here or cheerful slaves. There are also no messages or final-act summations or sermons. McQueen's method is more effective and subversive because of its primarily old-fashioned, Hollywood-style engagement. One of the shocks of 12 Years a Slave is that it reminds you how infrequently stories about slavery have been told on the big screen, which is why it's easy to name exceptions, like Richard Fleischer's demented, at times dazzling 1975 film, Mandingo .

The greater jolt, though, is that 12 Years a Slave isn't about another Scarlett O'Hara, but about a man who could be one of those anonymous, bent-over black bodies hoeing fields in the opening credits of Gone With the Wind , a very different "story of the Old South."

At one point in Northup's memoir, which was published a year after Uncle Tom's Cabin and eight years before the start of the Civil War, he interrupts an account of his own near-lynching to comment on the man largely to blame for the noose around his neck. "But whatever motive may have governed the cowardly and malignant tyrant," he writes, "it is of no importance." It doesn't matter why Northup was strung up in a tree like a dead deer in the summer sun, with little water to drink. What matters is what has often been missing among the economic, social and cultural explanations of American slavery and in many of its representations: human suffering. "My wrists and ankles, and the cords of my legs and arms began to swell, burying the rope that bound them into the snwollen flesh ".

McQueen's sympathies are as unqualified as his control. There is much to admire about 12 Years a Slave , including the cleareyed, unsentimental quality of its images - this is a place where trees hang with beautiful moss and black bodies - and how Ejiofor's restrained, open, translucent performance works as a ballast , something to cling onto, especially during the frenzies of violence. These are rightly hard to watch and bring to mind the startling moment in Maus , Art Spiegelman's cartoon opus about the Holocaust, in which he asks his "shrink" to explain what it felt like to be in Auschwitz: "Boo! It felt like that. But ALWAYS!" The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reapedan enduring, terrible price.