Werner Herzog’s emphatic declarations that he’s never seen Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant finally seem credible. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans plays as nothing if not a work-for-hire project, with Herzog approaching a story and cultural lineage to which he obviously has no innate connection, and imprinting his own flourishes and concerns . What makes the film an undeniable blast is that Herzog’s ongoing obsession with man’s inherent animal instinct meets its ideal expression in Nicolas Cage, an actor for whom hysteria is autopilot, who here finally finds justification for his odd hybrid of wide eyes and monotone. Whether they know they’re doing it or not, the actor and director laugh in the face of the earnest spiritual confusion that’s ultimately the Ferrara film’s raison d’etre, conjuring a powerfully loony portrait of American rot.

Cage plays Terrence, a New Orleans cop who injures his back saving the life of a prisoner drowning in a post-Katrina abandoned jail (“You are crazy!” exclaims his partner, played by Val kilmer, when it becomes clear Terrence is going to dive into a pool of snake-infested hurricane sludge to make a rescue). We jump forward from there six months, by which point a presciption vicodin habit has blossomed into a full-fledged crack and heroin addiction. Terrence, recently promoted to lieutenant, is entrusted with solving a multiple homocide that appears to be the work of drug kingpin Big Fate. The lieutenant is equally concerned with stealing drugs from perps, some of which he funnels to his hooker girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes).

Herzog seems to have a real interest in hurricane-decimated New Orleans, and why wouldn’t he? It took a combination of a natural disaster and unusual displays of human stupidity, selfishness and mismanagement to fully reveal the racial and class catastrophes in the shadow of the pay-to-play sin, and a potent debauched-paradise-destroyed mythology plays right into the filmmaker’s natural strengths. Herzog presents New Orleans as a jungle under grey skies, teeming with reptiles both real and imagined. Green eyes bugged and back hunched, Cage starts to resemble the artfully-lit iguanas and alligators that spot his crack hallucinations. Herzog often keeps the camera far away, all the better to observe his star slithering through otherwise-naturalistic setups.

Terrence’s own criminal behavior sometimes leads to him being literally bad at being a lieutenant, such as when he loses track of an informant in the midst of a crisis with Frankie, but on the whole Herzog seems to be interested in a less concrete notion of what it means to be bad. Where the Ferrara film was haunted by the notion of sin to the point of self-indulgence, Port of Call New Orleans finds fertile ambiguity in divorcing the idea of “badness” from moral dictates or spiritual consequences. There’s also a synergistic connection between Terrence’s “bad” behavior and his detective work that was missing from Ferrara’s film; there are throwaway gags in Herzog’s movie but, incredibly, Terrence goading Fate into smoking from his “lucky crack pipe” is not one of them. Herzog’s bad lieutenant is not a man fallen so far that he can no longer function, nor is he faking his depravity. He just lives in a world in which to be disassociated from reality offers certain advantages.