Weirdly, two movies are being released today about successful male athletes crippled by vehicular mishaps. But “The Lookout” and “The Peaceful Warrior” take this premise in very different directions. Just compare the romantic scenes: In “The Peaceful Warrior,” the girl places her hand over the hero’s heart and murmurs, “I don’t think your leg is the only thing that got broken.” In Scott Frank’s glucose-free version, she reaches a bit lower and says: “I see one part still works.”

Cheers to that. Mr. Frank scripted “Get Shorty” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight,” two of the best Hollywood adaptations of champion pulp novelist Elmore Leonard, so it’s no surprise that his directorial debut has the DNA of a classic film noir. It also has all the ingredients of a good one. Set against a bleak landscape of snowcrusted Kansas flatlands, “The Lookout” is a hard-boiled, moody thriller that could be a bit leaner, but otherwise gets the mix of snarl and pathos just right.

The opening frames find Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) literally in the driver’s seat. He’s a star high school athlete with a nice car, a girl, and friends who think he’s the man. He’s so sure these things are his birthright that he takes them zooming down the highway at about 80 miles an hour. Just for kicks, he switches the headlights off.

After Chris smashes into a broken-down piece of farm machinery — damn that sluggish corn-belt economy — we find him four years later as a completely different man: shaky hands, a limp, and a night job washing floors at a bank. His short-term memory is so bad as a result of the accident that he carries a notepad around. There’s a moving scene in his apartment in which, having forgotten where he left the can opener, he assaults a can with a kitchen knife, then gives up in despair. The former hockey star has been bested by a tomato container.

Chris’s good-natured roommate Lewis (Jeff Daniels), who is blind, urges Chris to come out of his shell of self-pity and make the most of his life. One night in a bar, a charismatic stranger named Gary (Matthew Goode) tells Chris much the same thing: “God closes a door and he opens a window.” Of course, the window in this case leads to the cash-filled safe at Chris’s bank, but Chris won’t learn that until later. For the moment, he’s busy getting to know Gary’s friend Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher), a frisky former stripper. (Apparently she got attached to her stage name).

Luvlee, who is actually quite sweet, eases Chris’s entry into Gary’s group of friends. Eventually this group is joined by a mysterious older man in black (Greg Dunham) who appears to be an original member of Black Sabbath but is, in fact, part of Gary’s sinister plan: to rob the bank, with Chris as the inside man. Chris initially resists, but Gary is a sweet-talker who knows just how to exploit Chris’s sense of emasculation.

“The Lookout,” which displays a piquant sense of irony at a few key moments — let’s just say that special treatment for the disabled can go too far — is a sharper movie than you might expect. It also has a wonderfully shaded character in Lewis, who is the film’s moral compass and is engagingly portrayed by Mr. Daniels. In the old days, Chris’s concerned ally would have been a pretty young brunette. The shaggy, shambling Mr. Daniels is not quite that, and the film is all the better for it. At ease with his handicap, Lewis smacks his lips at lunch and rhapsodizes on a waitress’s perfume without a shred of self-consciousness, and that’s precisely the point.

Mr. Frank’s script has a few hangups. Chris learns to jog his memory by reconstructing events in reverse order, which is fine as a technique but lame as a theme; unfortunately, Mr. Frank, perhaps to be clever, seems to want to make it just that. Luvlee drops out of the story rather unconvincingly, and there’s also an overlong epilogue in which the whole tense, sordid affair is wrapped up with the bow tied just right.

But Mr. Gordon-Levitt makes Chris’s fierce sense of shame palpable, Mr. Goode is suavely menacing, and there’s a forlorn desperation in cinematographer Alar Kivilo’s (“A Simple Plan”) wintry tableau. In other words, there’s plenty to make this crime story stick.