IF YOU WAXED poetic over Adrien Brody's penchant for commanding performances a year ago, most people would've simply replied, "Who?" One Oscar highlight later, of course, everybody knows and loves the golden boy with the sleepy eyes and the regal proboscis. But there were a handful of us who'd witnessed the lanky actor mouth Loachian rhetoric in Bread and Roses or retain his dignity in denim hot pants during the awkward Summer of Sam and had earmarked him as one to watch. He's easily the best thing about Love the Hard Way, a pre-Pianist endeavor that's eager to warm its hands on the Brody bandwagon heat. His Jack is the type of Bronx-bred hustler that only screenwriters can imagine (he rocks a snakeskin jacket, drives a baby blue Cadillac, and collects rare books!). Jack's main scam is pimping out girls and then posing as a cop to steal the johns' dough, but in his spare time he's a lothario who uses his criminal charm to attract the lasses. Enter a comely Columbia University grad student (Charlotte Ayanna), a woman who's as different from the petty crook "as Brazil is from Alaska" (ugh!) and whom he promptly seduces and abandons. She then decides to embark on a self-destructive path in an attempt to enter his world, with decidedly disastrous results. German writer-filmmaker Peter Sehr can't quite get the right chemical mixture of pulp and poetry needed in either the dialogue or the direction to give his narrative flight; luckily, Brody's ability to lift the role above Actors' Studio semaphore keeps Love above the drowning mark, though not enough to shake the fact that, per usual, he's the diamond shining in the dung. (David Fear)