After Ben Affleck’s career free-fall last decade, who would have predicted that he would have had such a remarkable artistic resurgence, much less that it would be driven by his work behind the camera rather than in front of it? In The Town, Affleck builds on the smart, unselfish directorial skill he demonstrated in Gone Baby Gone with yet another solid, Boston-based crime thriller. Only this time, he spends time on both sides of the lens — and shows that his easy confidence in the director’s chair is seeping into his performances as well.

The film, an adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves, centers on a heist crew based in Charlestown, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood north of downtown Boston that has for decades been home to an unusually high concentration of bank robbers. Affleck’s Doug McCray leads the crew; he’s a second-generation crook with a father living out the rest of his life in prison. McCray works for the same Irish mob boss (a frightening Pete Postlethwaite) his father did, pulling off meticulously planned bank jobs and armored car holdups along with his loose-cannon childhood friend Jim (Jeremy Renner).

Doug is smarter than his cohorts, a recovering alcoholic seemingly given laser-like focus by his sobriety and the commitment it took to get clean. He’s looking to a future beyond crime, which presents itself sooner than he might have anticipated in the form of Claire (Rebecca Hall), the primary witness to his most recent heist. He tails her to find out if she can identify them to the FBI, and ends up falling for her.