Over cigarettes in a Tokyo nightclub, a newbie crime reporter eager to make a mark is speaking to his source. Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort), an American who’s become fluent in Japanese to work as a journalist far from home, uses the language to ask his source Jin Miyamoto (Hideaki Itō) whether the city of Tokyo has officially recorded murder cases at all. Miyamoto, a corrupt cop, is briefly caught up in all the flashes of distraction the nightclub has to offer — bright lights, music, liquor on order and young women ambiently available — before explaining the situation to this outsider. He spells it out, in emphatic English, to make his point to the American: “There. Is. No. Murder. In. Japan.”

In other words, the Tokyo police of the late 1990s, when our story takes place, will use any excuse to look away from what’s happening. That’s in order to, among other goals, ensure equilibrium among the crime organizations doing business across the streets of the city. This gives a spark of motivation to Jake, who has left Missouri in search of action, excitement and the opportunity to do reporting that has real impact. In this adaptation of the real-life Adelstein’s memoir, Jake’s muscular self-belief runs headlong into a rigorously held silence. And this conflict, rippling across an environment whose language Jake speaks easily but whose codes he cannot crack, helps “Tokyo Vice” assert itself as a significant new entry in the crime-drama canon.

Executive producer Michael Mann, who directed the pilot, is putting himself out there in a striking way: Comparisons are, perhaps, inevitable to “Miami Vice,” the stylish 1980s serial he produced, as well as to the 2006 feature film of the same title he helmed. Mann’s sense for the visual language of temptation — conveying vice both as a scourge to be eliminated and as a decadent pleasure — enriches “Tokyo Vice.” So, too, does his understanding of hierarchies, within both the criminal and legitimate worlds: Much of the pilot is taken up with Jake’s trying to prove himself at the newspaper for which he works, one where cub reporters are expected simply to transcribe and print the police’s side of the story. Rinko Kikuchi is excellent as Jake’s editor, attempting to balance her advocacy for her writer with a confused sense that he can’t go on being intransigent forever.

And say this much for Elgort, a controversial figure off screen after allegations of sexual assault surfaced in 2020: On screen, he’s able to avoid many of the pitfalls into which an actor who looks like him on a Japan-set series might have fallen. The show is aware of what’s potentially uncomfortable about Jake as savior figure, and undercuts the narrative, and its protagonist, accordingly, starting with the performance. A natural slickness or seeming insincerity that has held Elgort back at other moments in his screen career here helps build a character who knows a fair amount and, as a result, thinks himself a genius. Speaking both English and Japanese, Elgort is absolutely credible as a thrill seeker who sees Tokyo as the staging ground for a story in which he can play hero. That means that what looks to him like crusading for the truth in the face of obstacles can appear to those around him like a white American delusionally disrupting an ecosystem he cannot hope to meaningfully comprehend. “You are an American, so you think you’re more talented than you actually are,” a colleague teases him; the joke hangs in the air even as Elgort contorts his face into sneering agreement.

But there’d be no show were Jake not talented enough to make headway — even if it’s often by luck or through the assistance of sympathetic Tokyo denizens, crucially Ken Watanabe’s detective Hiroto Katagiri. Watanabe is reliably terrific, and lends weariness and heft to Elgort’s bright-eyed gumshoe act. Elsewhere across the series, Rachel Keller is terrific as a young woman working her way through the nightclub scene (a milieu that will be familiar to anyone who’s read the true-crime classic “People Who Eat Darkness”). Her Samantha reluctantly helps Jake toward a more granular understanding of what he’s up against. And Keller’s performance as a woman whose journey to independence has ironically ended up with her living as a hostage to her patrons is excellent. Moments of her storyline that fall into cliché, like a perhaps-inevitable flashback to Samantha’s arrival in Japan, pulse with life despite the script’s shortcuts.

That’s true of much of “Tokyo Vice,” a beautifully shot and elegantly acted series that can seem at times to power past its writing. The pilot so effectively conjures the disorientation and novelty of a new place that the fish-out-of-water storyline feels somewhat new. Yet a backstory involving Jake’s family back home — though nicely performed by Jessica Hecht as forlorn mother and Elgort as wayward son — seems out of place. And if the script, like the show’s title, can lend an occasional sense of its setting as unusually rife with corruption, the core Watanabe-Elgort relationship makes clear the truth of the series: Tokyo, like all places, is impenetrable to those who don’t take the time to learn its ways on their own terms. In a rewardingly chewy complication that elevates “Tokyo Vice,” Jake’s journey toward that truth is one in which his Americanness — his eager outspokenness — is as often hindrance as help.

“Tokyo Vice” premieres Thursday, April 7, on HBO Max, with three episodes, followed by two episodes each Thursday up to the finale Thursday, April 28.