There is a chase sequence roughly forty minutes into "The Brisk and the Ill-Tempered" in which two men pursue each other across a roundabout in Guildford at a combined speed that never exceeds twenty-eight miles per hour. Both drivers use their indicators. One pauses to let a pedestrian cross. The scene lasts nine minutes and is, against all expectation, unbearably tense. Director Nigel Foss-Whitley, adapting the American street-racing formula for a nation that regards speed as a form of showing off, understands that danger is a matter of temperament, not velocity.

The film transplants the familiar architecture — the found family, the heists, the reverence for the internal combustion engine — onto the roads of the Home Counties, where the stakes are less mortal than social. Hugo Portsmouth, the 93-year-old stage actor making his screen debut after seventy years at the Old Vic, occupies the role that in another cinema would demand a shaved head and a whispered growl. Portsmouth does not growl. He enunciates. When he delivers the film's signature line — "I do this for family. Now what's for tea?" — he does so with the full weight of a man who has played Lear four times and considers a Vauxhall Astra a legitimate dramatic partner. It is a performance of astonishing stillness, in part because the actor moves slowly, and in part because he has clearly decided that slowness is the whole point. As his rival-turned-ally, Jacob Stilton-Leicester brings a broad, sitcom-honed energy that American audiences will not recognize and British audiences will find deeply reassuring. Beloved for nine series of the panel show "Bonkers" — a program whose format resists explanation and whose humor resists translation — he plays the enforcer as a man perpetually on the verge of saying 'bye' nine times before hanging up a phone. The chemistry between the two leads is real and strange: Portsmouth performing tragedy, Stilton-Leicester performing farce, the film somehow holding both. Their reconciliation scene, conducted over a shared packet of custard creams in a lay-by, is more moving than it has any right to be.

Foss-Whitley shoots the whole thing in the flat grey light of a country that has made peace with disappointment. The cinematography favors long, patient takes of overcast dual carriageways and car parks at Little Chef. There is no score to speak of, only the tick of an engine cooling and, occasionally, rain. When the film does finally cut loose — a climactic run to Ramsgate, achieved almost entirely within the speed limit — it earns its release not through spectacle but through the accumulated dignity of everything withheld. A subplot involving a stolen consignment of Jaffa Cakes strains even the generous logic Foss-Whitley has established, and the third act sags where an American cut would have inserted an explosion. These are minor complaints. There is something here that the franchise it descends from has never once attempted: the suggestion that a fast car, driven slowly and with care, might be the most honest expression of love a man is capable of. I found myself, absurdly, close to tears as a nonagenarian parallel-parked a modified saloon with the precision of a man who has nothing left to prove and every intention of proving it anyway.

The Brisk and the Ill-Tempered is rated 12A. Directed by Nigel Foss-Whitley. Running time: 2h 54m. In select theaters.