Rated R

“Miami Vice” is awash in light: colored club light, sunlight on the open ocean, highway light on sparkling cars, and light captured through sweeping glass windows, rolling around the homes of the rich. The sets shimmer and dance, as if the film reels themselves are being consumed in some kind of dreamy, slow burn.

Style is often cast as the antithesis of substance, but that’s just silly. Style, in the hands of an artist, is art, and after thirty years of movies and television, director Michael Mann is a master of light and color, of mood and moment, of atmosphere and poise, and it’s this deft hand that he brings to the movie version of “Miami Vice.”

Mann has also done more than his share to define cool—while the original “Miami Vice” television series may look like a joke now (pastel suits, Don Johnson, cops with white Ferraris), in 1984 it was cool itself: a moody, atmospheric show that was a cut above the cop shows that had come before, integrating MTV-era style and cinematography with an honest-to-God soundtrack of pop and instrumental music. The series was sometimes more polished and movie-like than the movies of the day, and its eventual distillation into cliché is a mark of its influence.

Having been the executive producer of the original series, Mann has now adapted his vision to the big screen.

Whatever your reaction to the movie, you can’t say it’s not authentic, and despite an all-new cast and an updating to present day, the adaptation is seamless. What has become iconic of the mid-’80s is, in Mann’s hands, a perfect fit for 2006 (proving either that style is timeless or that it’s not the white pants, but how you wear them).

Jamie Foxx exudes gravity as Detective Tubbs, and Colin Farrell somehow sports Don Johnson’s old hair without looking clownish. And Farrell updates Sonny Crockett for the 21st century—in 1984, Johnson played the player by being a cold, smooth bastard, but Farrell does it with big soft puppy eyes that make the ladies swoon because he’s sensitive.

The story is simple, and so classic for Miami Vice that it almost seems like the only story: when a drug sting goes bad, Crockett and Tubbs must go undercover to find the leak. Once they start doing deals and get inside the drug kingpin’s organization, they discover that the organization is so much bigger than they’d suspected that they must keep doing bigger deals in hopes of bringing down the whole apparatus. Along the way, the lines between cop and criminal blur, and in the end they’re all just lost souls caught in a zero-sum game.

The movie has some missteps. Barry Shabaka Henley as Lt. Castillo just barely occupies the shoes left behind by the TV show’s Edward James Olmos. The movie is slow, and it gets bogged down in the romance between Farrell and Gong Li. Some plot points are just barely resolved, and we miss Elvis the alligator, although we understand he must be old by now.

Unlike Mann’s more pointed and story-driven “Collateral” or “Heat,” “Miami Vice” is more of a meditation, a series of moments strung together by the filmmaker’s art. Scene by scene, there’s more emotion than the sparse dialogue might suggest, and the movie sure is pretty, and it sure sounds great.

A “Miami Vice” koan:

“How fast is your boat?” asks Gong Li, on a walkway overlooking the sparkling water. She is thin and severe, and has not yet smiled or shown any possibility of it.

“Very fast,” says Colin Farrell. He has asked her to have a drink with him, and she has accepted. Her bar of choice, however, is in Havana.

How fast is your boat?