If you're planning to rob a bank it would help as far as identification was concerned that your inside man suffered recurring memory loss.

The frontal lobe of bank janitor Chris Pratt (Gordon-Levitt) was severely dented when his car ploughed head-on into a combine harvester four years before.

Now, his mind a leaky sieve, he struggles through the day, noting down his every task and using his trusty notebook as an instruction manual to perform the most basic function.

He lives with Lewis (Daniels), a wisecracking and fiercely independent blind man, and works the night shift buffing up the floor of his local smalltown farmers' bank.

Riddled with anxiety about the car accident that maimed his girlfriend and killed two of his buddies, he finds the combination of guilt and memory loss socially crippling.

So it's with some surprise that he strikes up a rapport in a bar with the charismatic Gary (Matthew Goode) and even more unlikely when he gets to squeeze ex-stripper Luvlee Lemons (Fisher).

Gary welcomes him to the fold - a coterie of lowlifes who appear to include Bono's dad. However, he's less keen on his new chums when it transpires they're planning to rob a bank. His bank.

Lewis may be blind but he smells a rat. Chris, however, is inexorably seduced by Luvlee's charms and swayed by Gary's plausible spiel so agrees to go along. It'll be a night even he won't forget.

After getting off to a shaky start, Scott Frank's thriller ingeniously begins to exert a grip as Chris - his mind of jumble of unreliable data - is pulled into Gary's web.

While some components of the plot don't really add up (would Chris, despite his debilitating trauma, really buy the anti-corporate credentials of the bankrobbers?), a willing suspension of disbelief brings its own rewards.

It's a refreshing departure from formula and a thriller you won't easily forget.

Tim Evans