In the Flesh: Good Time

Things fall apart. Yeats said it, but the Safdie Brothers have made a career out of depicting it on film. Watching Good Time feels like standing in the shadow of a collapsing skyscraper, five hundred thousand tons of rebar and concrete cascading toward you, dust flooding the streets in a choking wave. To say things begin to go wrong at the jump and only get worse is a nearly biblical understatement, and there’s a hypnotic quality to the speed and consistency with which it happens that’s very much on the same wavelength as Oneohtrix Point Never’s vaporwave/trip-hop soundtrack. The frenetic pace that so distinguished Uncut Gems is very much in evidence here, but there are moments when things slow down, when we’re left alone with the film’s cast of dysfunctional and broken people as they do their feeble best to understand themselves and the world around them.

The opening scene in which psychiatrist Peter (Peter Verby) assesses the cognitively impaired Nikolas Nikas’s (Benny Safdie) ability to understand associations and connections between things is a heartbreaking example of exactly this kind of meditative interlude. Safdie’s performance contains no shade of caricature or dehumanization, but nor is it given over to sentimentality or romanticism. Nick is emotionally stunted not just because of his disability, but because of a lifetime of violence he can barely articulate, let alone understand. His halting, fractured explanation of a fight between him and his grandmother, one in which he’s unsure whether he was aggressor or victim or something in between, reads like a child’s summary of the film itself. It’s mirrored by Ray’s (Buddy Duress, whose name perfectly describes his role here) brutally straightforward stoner tale, which he recounts with a brutal, perfect lack of insight.

That lack of insight is everywhere here as Nick’s brother, Connie (Robert Pattinson), a petty criminal, scrambles to spring Nick from a hospital. Crystal (Taliah Lennice Webster) has been left so unprepared to defend herself that Connie effortlessly embroils her in his hustle. Ray has no idea what kind of person he is or why his life looks the way it does. Even Connie, clever enough to trick his way out of jam after jam, can’t see that the rant he delivers to Ray about Ray’s valuelessness, his net-negative impact on the world around him, is really about himself. There’s a lot of After Hours in Good Time’s DNA, but what’s madcap and absurdist in Scorsese’s hands is enough to give you an ulcer in the Safdie brothers’. Their New York isn’t zany or confounding or bound together by preternatural coincidence; it’s a warren of desperate people kept locked in ignorance and beaten down by racist state violence and enforced poverty, a seething anthill of human misery where even basic human connection is nearly impossible.