“You’ve got a head like mine,” Edward Norton says, quoting himself – riffing, actually – on the screenplay he wrote for his recent adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn, which the actor also directed and in which he, also, stars – “always boiling over and turning things around”.

We’re on the phone and these words – which Norton is offering to me as evidence, some sort of indication of what drew him to play the character of Lionel Essrog, the Tourette’s-afflicted detective at the centre of Lethem’s novel, and which moved him to spend nearly 20 years piecing together his film (the book was published in 1999, and Norton optioned it shortly thereafter) – ring out in a way that feels revealing. “Some people call it a gift, but it’s a brain affliction all the same,” Norton adds, completing the line which in the film is spoken by Michael K Williams (as compelling here as he was in The Wire), but which Norton suggests is a kind of key, a way that he, as an actor, could understand a character with Tourette’s Syndrome. (“I think actors tend to be pretty mimetic, with an instinct towards mimicry and the sound of people’s voices,” he adds. “I’m thankful I don’t have what I would call the paralysing aspects some people with Tourette’s seem to experience, but acting has always been a place for me to channel that kind of love affair with words.”) All this seems true to me – I’ve never known an artist whose gift didn’t feel like an affliction to them at least some of the time – but as I’m on the phone with Norton, who’s calling from the Telluride Film Festival, where Motherless Brooklyn just had its premiere, I feel a little shock of recognition at the line, just as I had when I saw a screening of the film a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s because everybody’s head seems to be boiling over a little bit these days, and the hectic slaw of meaning-and-interpretation that would live inside a Lionel Essrog’s head could be familiar to anyone who’s ever felt trapped inside their Twitter feed; maybe it’s because the words, like Norton’s performance, and indeed like the movie itself, simply feel achingly and gratifyingly personal.

Norton has made at least a portion of his career playing characters with a certain volcanic undercurrent – for example, the unnamed protagonist of 1999’s Fight Club – but on the phone, of course, he doesn’t seem to be “boiling over” at all. He’s affable, attentive and – this is the pleasure of it, for me – searchingly intelligent. I find myself leaning into his occasional silences and pauses, the way one does in any good conversation – leaning into that distinctive voice that is familiar to most moviegoers, melding as it does a certain warm vulnerability with a faint, adenoidal trace of sarcasm – with a kind of suspense, anticipating whatever flash of insight he’ll be able to offer next. Motherless Brooklyn is an excellent film (and, perhaps astonishingly considering its complete assurance, only Norton’s second as a director, after 2000’s Keeping the Faith), but it is also a vibrant reinvention of a classic noir detective story, replete with so many of the traditional hardboiled tropes – wary narrative voiceover; a creamy jazz score; a byzantine plot involving corrupt city officials – that feels not just ‘new’ but in fact pointedly contemporary in its relevance. The film’s villain (even if, like so many of the truly great noirs that preceded it, like Chinatown or A Touch of Evil, Motherless serves up a ‘villain’ of such relish it feels a bit reductive to call him one) is based on Robert Moses, the legendary ‘master builder’ of 20th-century Manhattan, and played by Alec Baldwin. The character also has certain resemblances, in his venality and unchecked aggression, in his naked racism and New York-real-estate chicanery, to another former developer who looms large on the American stage in 2019.