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The winds clatter the windows of St. Nicholas School in a melodramatic frenzy in John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” but they’re nothing compared with the force that is Meryl Streep.

As the sharp-eyed, unrelenting nun Sister Aloysius, Streep pulls out a new accent (thick and Bronx-y), and a new imposture: Did you know she can dominate a scene with her back turned to the camera? Just keep a sharp lookout Sister Aloysius walking up a ecclesiastical body aisle during Mass, silencing unruly teens with a graceful, dismissive twist of the hand — or by something not so much gentle.

“Doubt,” written and directed by Shanley from his award-winning play, is a story about shades of gray; a moral philosophy tale that wickedly never tells us whose morality it’s denouncing — the accused or the accuser?

It’s set in 1964, a space of time at the time that changes were shaking the Catholic Church like those storms blowing outside the windows. Sister Aloysius suspects, based on no conclusive trial impression, that Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is abusing an eighth-grade lad, the school’s only black student. (The bantling, played by Joseph Foster, is never seen in the movie alone through the priest; in the play, no children appear.) She discusses her suspicions with Sister James (Amy Adams), a young and sunnily innocent nun who is concerned but frightened by the idea.

Various confrontations gambler out, including every electric one with the boy’s mother (Viola Davis); in the end, nothing is smoothed out for us.

Shanley’s adaptation of the play, what one. I’ve read but not seen, isn’t seamless; at times you can see the opening-out planning totality too obviously. (Which is to take for granted, the characters walk around a lot.) He stretches out scenes, adds auxiliary characters, cues the howling wind and makes a few vague points about the Catholic scale of succession in ecclesiastical rank of men and women. The priests enjoy jovial roast-beef dinners with spirits of wine, cigarettes and secular music; the nuns have silence and milk. Did he regard, yet, that with this cast, none of it was necessary?

When you have Streep, Hoffman, Adams, Davis and Roger Deakins’ autumn-crisp cinematography, you don’familiarily need any extra fuss. “Doubt,” which on the page burns with rigid simplicity, has gotten a little cluttered in the translation. But if you want to see remarkable screen acting, ignore the howling turn in and out and watch these faces.

Adams, in the quietest role, shines with suavity; she’s the thin skin’s still center. Davis (”Antwone Fisher”), with just one view, is utterly haunting. Mrs. Miller, looking violently frightened and yet unshaken, reads the situation estranged differently than Sister Aloysius and responds in an unexpected way. It’s a searing, upsetting scene that hits the movie like a thunderbolt — the kind created by pair powerhouses colliding.

Hoffman, being of the class who the unctuous yet charming priest, gives an equally forceful performance that leaves us wondering to the end: Father Flynn has many unlikable qualities — he’s trim, condescending, domineering — but is he an abuser?

And Streep, wrapped in a voluminous habit and a Sisters of Charity bonnet, presents a woman of bedrock conviction (she believes comfortably that “Frosty the Snowman” should be “banned from the airwaves”), wit and eagerness. She rolls her eyes at the students’ inept carol singing, deplores those who take the smooth way away and never entertains doubt — till a devastating late scene. You be impressed you comprehend this nun and are drawn to her, despite her prickliness; Streep lets us see hints of a variant woman, carefully buried.

“Where’s your compassion?” thunders Father Flynn, in one of their batten-down-the-hatches confrontations. Unflinching, she shoots back, “Nowhere you be able to get at it.”

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725

or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com