One aspect of “The Seven Five” with plenty of current resonance is its portrait of police culture. In one sense, Dowd, though suspected by some of his colleagues, was able to take his criminal career to such lengths because of cops’ unwillingness to rat on each other. (He eventually got popped by Suffolk County police for selling drugs there, not by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs unit.) On the other hand, the film clearly suggests the relative rarity of bad cops like Dowd in showing how difficult it was for him to get others to join him in his pursuit of easy money on the wrong side of the law.

His most important victory in this respect was his partner, Kenny Eurell. The two men were in their 20s when they met, with wives and young kids. It took Dowd six months to lure Eurell into the criminal fold, but once he did, their bond became incredibly intense; one compares it to a love affair. They shared in the danger and in the illegal rewards, from fancy cars to expensive vacations to nice suburban houses.

Like his fictional doppelgangers – think Pacino’s Scarface – Dowd was destined to be undone by his penchant for excess. Drinking heavily and using as much coke as he was selling, he became careless and reckless. Yet even after he was arrested for peddling drugs, the feds got in on the act, and the extent of his misdeeds began coming to light, he couldn’t be stopped. While out on bail, he got involved in a nutty and lethal criminal scheme that ended up costing him what may have been his greatest asset: his best friend’s loyalty.

Both wrenching and enlightening, “The Seven Five” avoids sensationalism to provide a nuanced, thoughtful account of material that’s at once sordid and instructive. I came out of it hoping (futilely, no doubt) that Hollywood producers aren’t already lunging to turn it into a big, splashy crime epic. We’ve already seen that movie, too many times. The real thing is far more sobering and useful.

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