Directed by Sam Mendes. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, January 9, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

The title Revolutionary Road is meant to be ironic; the action in this 1950s-set drama takes place in a metaphoric suburban cul-de-sac, on a street that started with the noble ideals of rebellion and whimpered away in Eisenhower-era conformity.

We definitely have been down that road before, far into the martini-pickled heart of Cheever Country, with extra olives supplied by John Updike and others. Here, American morality is shaken by novelist Richard Yates.

Yates’s best-known book—here adapted by screenwriter Justin Haythe for director Sam Mendes, who knows something about suburban horror (as in American Beauty)—centres on the Wheelers, a bright young husband and wife who channel much creative energy into eating each other alive. On-screen, the man in the gray flannel suit is Leonardo DiCaprio, perfect as Frank, a Second World War veteran whose ambitions don’t seem to exceed filling a cubicle at the Manhattan insurance firm where his late father’s life was wasted.

Frank’s bright spot—and the spot that burns—is April (Kate Winslet, aka Mrs. Mendes), whose failed acting career has now dwindled down to vague bohemian dreams of something better. She thinks Frank is the one to be acting out those dreams, even though his imagination doesn’t really run past acting superior to the other guys and bagging the occasional newbie from the typing pool.

The dreaming is done at a tidy, whitewashed bungalow in Connecticut, where the couple’s realtor (Kathy Bates) views them as worthy of meeting her son (Michael Shannon, in two bravura scenes), a brilliant but mentally damaged mathematician who rails at them like an Old Testament patriarch.

Patriarch is a key word, although it never occurs to April that some of her biggest problems may be systemic in ways that aren’t all American in origin. The movie is a small masterpiece of gender-role tragedy; you could say it’s the anti-Titanic. But I kept thinking that the Wheelers might have been saved if they had just followed the interstate all the way to Greenwich Village.