Johnny Handsome spent nearly two decades trying to get made. Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights to John Godey’s novel in 1972, but the project stalled there. Godey, the pen name of Morton Freedgood, had already written the novel that became The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and producer Charles Roven eventually brought “The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome” to Walter Hill in 1982. Hill passed more than once before agreeing to direct after the story shifted from a New Jersey mobster to a Southern outsider in New Orleans.

Even then, the pieces kept moving. Richard Gere was attached by 1987 with Harold Becker directing. Al Pacino came aboard next, then departed after Hill replaced Becker. Mickey Rourke finally took the lead, Carolco put up $20 million, and cameras rolled in New Orleans and at Angola prison in the fall of 1988. After all that time getting to the screen, the movie itself wastes very little getting down to business.

John Sedley (Mickey Rourke, Diner) is a small-time New Orleans crook born with a severely disfigured face and saddled with the cruel nickname Johnny Handsome. A robbery goes bad when his partners, Sunny Boyd (Ellen Barkin, Tender Mercies) and Rafe Garrett (Lance Henriksen, Aliens), double-cross him. His best friend is killed, and Johnny lands in prison, where surgeon Dr. Steven Resher (Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels’ The Butler) offers him something he’s never had: a new face and the possibility of a fresh start. Lieutenant A.Z. Drones (Morgan Freeman, My Dead Friend Zoe) isn’t convinced Johnny wants the second part.

And yes, the movie asks us to believe reconstructive surgery can take Johnny from his heavily prostheticized appearance to, well, Mickey Rourke. That requires a pretty healthy suspension of disbelief. Hill himself described the surgery hook as an old-fashioned melodramatic device, and that’s really the only way to approach it. The transformation isn’t so much about medical realism as giving Johnny the chance to become someone else, then asking whether changing what everyone sees can change anything underneath.

That puts Johnny Handsome firmly in the territory of a 1940s B noir dressed up in late-’80s clothes, full of doomed characters, bad decisions and the nagging sense that revenge is going to collect more than it pays. Siskel and Ebert made a similar comparison when they gave the film two thumbs up. Hill keeps things lean, too. He gives Johnny a new face, but he never pretends that automatically means a new life.

Barkin and Henriksen make an especially vicious pair, both earning Chicago Film Critics Association nominations for their work. Donna McCarty (Elizabeth McGovern, Downton Abbey), the woman Johnny meets after his release, gives the movie much-needed warmth without turning it into an easy path to redemption. Rourke plays a man who gets a new face and keeps the old grudge. That contradiction is where the movie is most interesting, because Johnny finally gets the chance to walk through the world without being judged on sight and still can’t stop looking backward.

Nobody is likely to put Johnny Handsome alongside The Warriors or Southern Comfort as one of Hill’s defining films. It’s a sturdy B-movie with an unusually stacked cast, but that’s hardly an insult. Ry Cooder’s swampy score, mixing atmosphere with Cajun rock, gives the whole thing exactly the right temperature. Released in September 1989, the film made roughly $7 million against its $20 million budget, and Hill later said it played better overseas.

Its reputation has improved with age. JoBlo eventually filed it under “The Best Movie You Never Saw,” and the cult around it has continued to grow. Maybe Johnny just needed a little time for the rest of us to catch up.