John Dillinger wasn't a man of many words.

"I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars...and you. What else do you need to know?" Dillinger asks girlfriend Billie Frechette upon their first meeting in "Public Enemies."

One more thing: "I rob banks."

Not exactly your usual pitch to a hot girl. But when it's Johnny Depp selling his wares, as he does in this movie to French actress Marion Cotillard, we know she'll buy it.

So will we.

The notorious Depression-era gangster lets us in on many things about himself in this slick new flick from Michael Mann ("Miami Vice," "Collateral," "The Insider").

Obsessed with planning the perfect heist, Dillinger could rob a bank in one minute and 40 seconds. He could outrun the law faster than an impish jackrabbit escaping a butcher's blade.

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Dillinger liked Clark Gable movies. He also never stole from the Average Joe, even if they happened to be depositing cash at the time of one of his holdups.

"Is that your money?" Dillinger asks a nervous customer in one scene. "We're here for the bank's money, not yours. Put it away."

These human quirks, embodied in a ruthless gunslinger sporting a dapper suit, helped lionize Dillinger and his exploits over the decades.

But where lesser actors might have sprung for B-movie affectations and egomaniacal self-confidence in this role, Depp keeps things low-key yet crystal clear.

Dillinger is a killer. No more. No less.

Billie is a lost girl looking to be protected during the Great Depression. No more. No less.

FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the man entrusted with taking Dillinger down, is an unromanticized underling for J. Edgar Hoover. No more. No less.

That reality is the beauty of Mann's movie.

It would have been so easy to "go Hollywood" on this one. But with jeweller-like precision Mann and cast make this film all about the inner realities to these legendary figures, not just the big, machine-gun show.

Dillinger shoots. He kills. Indeed, this hard-boiled thug lives for every minute of it.

But played with Depp's cool, disciplined restraint, Dillinger's loyalty and need to protect Billie stands in even sharper contrast to his gangster brutality.

That daring reserve also makes those few moments when Dillinger does indulge in feeding his psychological needs more potent.

You see it when he gives Billie a fur coat, the corners of his taut, unsmiling lips curling with almost odious excitement.

You see it when Dillinger strolls right into the midst of FBI headquarters, his blank face pulsing with a cocky, "screw you" elation that begs to be screamed.

Instead, he walks on among the inept, newbie FBI agents, his deep, dark criminal psyche stoked by the fact that he's just too good for these bozos to catch.

Devoid of those clichés we've come to expect from Hollywood gangster flicks, Mann serves up a tight, well-researched and convincing flick that focuses on just 13 months in Dillinger's life.

Dillinger busts out of the slammer. He finds love. He lives. Then on July 22, 1933, the 31-year-old felon dies brutally in a police shoot-out outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre.

These are the facts history tells us, and what Mann delivers.

But just like 1934's "Manhattan Melodrama," Gable's fleetingly brilliant crime drama which Dillinger watched before being gunned down, Depp adds something elusive to "Public Enemies": A ring of truth. It makes this 1930s gangster tale eerily relevant in our troubled world.