Soon she is weaning her charges on Bob Dylan lyrics (analyses of the narcotic subtext to “Mr Tambourine Man”) and candy bars (for good behaviour). Faced with a class that make the old Shed End at Chelsea seem a model of propriety, she exchanges her overwhelmed look and meek smile for jeans, a leather jacket and a new attitude. As uplifting as it is gruelling, it’s an extraordinary movie.Casting an ex-Marine teacher of ghetto kids, who else would you choose but Michelle Pfeiffer? Dangerous Minds (15), a true story and a To Michelle, With Love, doesn’t make much of Pfeiffer’s brawny past, for obvious reasons, but she’s good enough to have us suspending our disbelief within minutes. He turns a simple scene in the novel, when a crashed-out Ben is robbed in LA by a hooker, into a piece of poignant erotica as she sucks the wedding ring from his finger.Leaving Las Vegas fulfils the promise of Figgis’s earlier work, films such as Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs and Liebestraum: his jazzy energy, tender eye for relationships, feeling for sexual obsession, skill with actors, and obvious delight in an understanding of film itself, all come gloriously together. In BBC2’s Close-Up series, Figgis spoke brilliantly about Godard. And Leaving Las Vegas feels more continental than British or American; it has the same jagged intensity in its acting as Last Tango in Paris.

The movie swoons to romantic melodies, sung by Sting, while Figgis’s own jazz score is adept at moving from the screech and trembling of delirium to the lull and lyricism of love. Figgis sticks closely to both the spirit and the letter of the book, using the device of Sera talking to camera (maybe to an analyst off-screen) to allow us into her thoughts His screenplay is often inspired. Likewise, Ben, despite the direness of his straits, retains a consideration for others. Despite the depravity that is the novel’s subject – and which the film unflinchingly recreates – O’Brien believed in a nobility the world couldn’t quite match.

Sera, with her boundless compassion, is, Ben says, “an angel”. O’Brien writes that she “never really understood why so many people choose contempt as the first option”. Not the least boon of the movie’s American success – it has won several critics’ awards and looks headed for Oscar recognition – is that it has returned this harrowing, beautiful book to print (by Macmillan here). O’Brien shot himself last year, aged 33, shortly before Leaving Las Vegas was filmed. It might be facile to read the book as a suicide note, but there is a hint of a suicide’s self-pity and vengeance, as well as idealism, in an ending that starkly leaves Sera “awake in the darkness”. In this deep-ly moving finale, O’Brien writes: “It all became clear [to Sera], how much more deliberate his life was than hers, how he knew the one great trick that she couldn’t do, and how she would fall in love with him every minute, every second, over and over again, for the rest of her life.”Figgis has recognised this wild romanticism as the keynote of the book.