David O Russell's brazen, nerve-jangling, irresistibly watchable black comedy American Hustle is loosely based on a true story from the 1970s of how the FBI forced a notorious New Jersey conman to help entrap corrupt politicians with the offer of bribes from a "fake sheikh", a scam later beloved in British tabloid circles.  It blends the wiseguy voiceover nostalgia of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas with the cheeky imposture of George Roy Hill's The Sting, and the headbutting and faintly surreal non-sequiturs in the dialogue have a little of David Mamet. But there is also something unmistakably Russell-esque in the neurotic, shrill and often very funny drama: a kind of neo-noir farce. Russell distils his own toxic kind of nitrous oxide and pipes it into the cinema.  He takes four entirely preposterous characters, who take themselves entirely seriously: they begin to enact something like a dysfunctional four-way comedy routine, or perhaps a challengingly atonal modern jazz quartet. They are people who hate and love each other, and everyone often seems on the point of screaming, like Gene Wilder deprived of his blue blanket in The Producers.  Christian Bale plays Irv Rosenfeld, a heavy-set, ugly, resentful and self-pitying grifter with a combover who appears to epitomise the Spinal Tap maxim about it being a fine line between stupid and clever. He is married to single mother Rosalyn, who keeps setting fire to the house with malfunctioning appliances. It is a role for which Jennifer Lawrence is probably far too beautiful, but she very entertainingly conveys Rosalyn's proud sense of herself as an emotionally sincere person: Irv calls her the "Picasso of passive-aggressive karate". At one stage she rocks out extravagantly to Live and Let Die, while elsewhere Irv is being ignominiously roughed up by the mobsters that he has attempted to trick.  But Irv is passionately in love with his mistress, super-sexy Sydney Prosser, played with a gleam of pure self-harming passion by Amy Adams. She is an ambitious and defiant survivor whom Irv has introduced to his con business, taking five thousand-dollar cheques from desperate people in exchange for promised cash loans of many tiimes that amount.  Sydney puts on a fake British accent, styles herself Lady Edith and tells Irv's marks she has banking contacts in London. Like all confidence tricksters, she is a sociopath, and cannot quite bring herself to abandon the British accent: it fades in and out of her real voice. Irv and Lady Edith are ensnared by hyperactive, ambitious federal agent Richie, played by Bradley Cooper, who puts his hair in curlers to get the tight frizz. He recruits them to his entrapment programme, and falls in love with Sydney, who plays along with a wan erotic languour, in case she needs him at some future juncture.  The bizarre, uproarious and semi-credible story rattles along with plenty of comic setpieces along the way. Richie is infuriated by his tightass boss Stoddard Thorsen, played by Louis CK, who is reluctant to use official funds for his crazy entrapment schemes and keeps on telling him a homely anecdote about his childhood ice fishing, which Richie keeps petulantly interrupting when he thinks he understands the moral. It is a running gag, punctuated by furious rows and there is even a psychotic flashback in which the two appear to be pulling guns on each other in some scuzzy bathroom: did that really happen? Or just in Richie's head?  There are scenes of pure mobster sentimentality as Irv insists on going to dinner à quatre with Rosalyn and Mayor Carmine Polito and his wife to exactly the kind of steakhouse that was regularly torched for the insurance in GoodFellas. The mayor, played with genial used-car salesman brio by Jeremy Renner, who incidentally sports another of the film's outrageous hairstyles, becomes a sort of friend of Irv and he feels bad about tricking someone with whom he has broken bread and quoted the Bible: "When you are offered a favour or money, take the favour, not the money. Jesus said that, didn't he?"  The pressure-cooker simmer of suppressed madness bubbles continuously through American Hustle – much more consistently than in his previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, and more entertainingly than in an earlier film such as I Heart Huckabees. And even the macho aggression is more interesting, for me, in this comic incarnation than in Russell's much-admired The Fighter. It is an intriguing confection of a movie, announcing its influences candidly, but exerting its originality too. The performances are far from subtle, yet they have an eye-popping, beads-of-sweat commitment: Lawrence, Cooper and Adams are all great, and Christian Bale comes up with a new glowering impersonation of middle-aged disillusionment and vulnerability.  • Oscar predictions 2014: American Hustle• News: American Hustle wins over NY critics
The director of Silver Linings Playbook returns with a simmering and intriguingly confected black comedy, writes Peter Bradshaw