“Do you remember De Niro in Heat?” asks Michael Mann. That 1995 crime spectacle was the last Mann movie to reach theaters before his latest, The Insider, which starts out as an exposé of the cigarette industry, expands to debunk broadcast news and lays bare the existential anguish of white-collar America. Mann co-wrote The Insider (with Eric Roth) as well as directing and co-producing it – but now he's busy diverting attention from himself.

“Think of De Niro,” he repeats. “Gray!” he explains with comical exasperation, waving at his neutral-colored Los Angeles office walls. “That's what I aspire to – gray!” This is Mann-talk for keeping the personal out of interviews. Mann doesn't want to speak about his non-working life. He feels abashed every time he does.

So he invokes the character De Niro played in Heat: a master thief who lives in Spartan elegance and keeps off-the-job attachments to a minimum. De Niro's goal is to have nothing that would prevent him from disappearing in 30 seconds. Mann's goal is to say nothing that would distract potential viewers from staying hooked to his new movie for two hours and 32 minutes.

He needn't worry. I've been a Mann fan since his TV film The Jericho Mile in 1979, and I think The Insider is Mann at his peak. It's that rarity in movies: a realistic spellbinder, head-clearing and hypnotic. It's not merely a docudrama about Big Tobacco, Big Television and a whistle-blower who upends both. The Insider is a docutragedy about men who face, too late, that they are bigger than the jobs corporate America lets them do. It's a ravaging account of the hell their business dealings wreak on their bonds with friends and family.

And it gives “maturity” a good name. In his best stuff for movies (Thief, The Last of the Mohicans) and for episodic television (Miami Vice and Crime Story), Mann has been an iconoclast and a creator of icons. Using bold audiovisual strokes and veracious observations to tear down simplistic urban or frontier fables, he has erected more complex, modern and seductive mythologies in their stead.