Being Jodie Foster means never having to fight for the blanket in the morning. To her long line of widowed/divorced/romantically deprived heroines, add Erica Kane, the fear-addled radio personality who cuts a swath of bloody vengeance across New York City in Neil Jordan's rousing vigilante thriller “The Brave One.”

Certainly, it's the kind of lone-wolf role to which Foster (“Silence of the Lambs,” “Flightplan”) has become accustomed, albeit with a few eccentric surfaces to keep it from sliding into strictly predictable, regendered “Death Wish” territory.

Wearing her tomboyish shag like an emblem of urban female self-actualization, Foster plays Erica, an AM-radio storyteller whose Armistead Maupin-style ruminations about the disappearing “beauty and ugliness” of New York have earned her a small but loyal cult following. Waxing poetic about Sid Vicious at the Chelsea Hotel and other legends of the bygone Big Apple, Erica fancies herself a mythologist, the lone guard against Rudy Giuliani-style gentrification.

Perversely, Erica gets a bigger dose of New York ugliness than she can handle when a pleasant nighttime stroll with her physician fiancé (Naveen Andrews from “Lost”) is interrupted by a gang of vicious, camcorder-wielding street punks. True to form, Jordan (“The Crying Game”) delivers the violence unflinchingly - all the better to tear apart Erica's illusions of security and set the table for the feast of get-back to come.

Emerging from a three-week coma, Erica awakens to a new, less enchanted life. Her fiancé is dead, and she is unable to walk the street without wigging out. Marching into a gun store and impatiently demanding a firearm, Erica is like a drug addict looking to self-medicate. “I won't live 30 days!” she wails when told of the mandatory waiting period.

Naturally, Erica does get her gun, and - just as naturally - finds herself discharging it into bad people she meets on the subway, at the liquor store, etc. Pretty standard, avenging-angel stuff, but Erica is no steely, Charles Bronson-style street warrior. She's just a messed-up woman with an unusual coping mechanism, which allows her to embark on a halfway-normal friendship with a concerned homicide detective named Mercer (Terrence Howard from “Hustle and Flow”) who would never dream that the vigilante he's tracking is a mere woman.

“Women kill their children, boyfriends, husbands … things they love,” cracks Mercer's wiseacre partner (Nicky Katt).

Such humorous side trips tend feel a little out of place in the weighty dramatic flow of Jordan's direction, but Foster's full-boil performance is more than a match for such desultory trifles. Moreover, “The Brave One” is the rare, post-P.C. revenge drama that fully embraces its vigilante essence, and it makes for a jarring - if entirely welcome - show of affection.

‘The Brave One'

Stars: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Jane Adams

Behind the scenes: Directed by Neil Jordan, from a script by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort

Rated: R for strong violence, language and some sexuality

Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes

Grade: B