New York Movie Roundup: The Safdie Brother’s “Good Time” and Alex Ross Perry’s “Golden Exits”.

Is it too soon to see that Josh and Benny Safdie feel like the future of cinema?

The fraternal filmmaking duo have been compared to a whole host of independent filmmakers two or even three times their age — John Cassavetes for their nerve-jangling psychocomedic breakout “Daddy Longlegs,” Larry Clark for their compassionate junkie tone poem “Heaven Knows What,” and recently Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrara for their newest effort: an impressionistic, hypnotically scuzzy New York City nightmare ironically titled “Good Time”. Shit, the brothers even got hit with the “Hoop Dreams” association for their unsparing documentary about former NBA hopeful Lenny Cooke, and his career that never was.

All highfalutin cinematic allusions aside, there is a sense of needling, impatient rage — coupled with an authentic sense of empathy for the marginalized, lower-class stragglers of modern-day urban America — that makes the oeuvre of this up-and-coming duo feel unlike anything else in the current American moviegoing landscape. In an indie film climate where calcified slop is often passed off as being “edgy”, the Safdie Brothers’ work is as jarring and attention-getting as a sharp jolt of unfiltered amphetamine, or a slap upside the head from a stranger on the street. Like the best art, it demands that you engage with it, regardless of your subjective reaction to what’s onscreen.

The Safdies first came to my attention with 2014’s “Heaven Knows What,” which bears the distinction of being perhaps the most powerful film made about heroin since Darren Aronofsky’s more moralistic “Requiem for a Dream”. The Safdies were researching their long-gestating passion project — a drama set in the Diamond District of Manhattan called “Uncut Gems” — when they discovered the movie’s then-homeless star, Arielle Holmes, begging for change on the street. At the brother’s encouragement, Holmes adapted the chronicling of her reckless, dangerous existence on New York’s unforgiving city blocks into a memoir, which resulted in the script for the Safdie’s breakout feature.

Acted largely by non-professionals and populated with an eclectic supporting cast that included grimy East Coast rapper Necro and “street legend” Buddy Duress (both of whom show up in “Good Time”), “Heaven Knows What” was one of the most startling pictures of that year, all but spitting in the face of more polished Hollywood films that subjected their heroes to phony moral closure. The Safdies can be messy and they may, at times, be a little too in love with their demented outlaw characters, but phony is something they don’t know how to do.

And so now, we have “Good Time,” a dizzying, violent, and front-to-back brilliant film that all but solidifies the Safdies as the foremost underground filmmakers of their generation. “Good Time” unfolds as a rough-and-tumble race through one hectic night in a reimagined version of Queens that bring to mind the great, hyperrealistic underground crime flicks of the 1970’s (“Dog Day Afternoon,” “Mean Streets,” “The Seven-Ups, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”). Forget the movie’s bland title: “Good Time” is a great time, a breathless, instant-classic rush of a movie that coasts on an intoxicating mood of druggy euphoria and underdog heroism. This deranged slice of streets-is-watching mayhem feels as urgent and uncensored as anything to be released in American cinemas this year. It’s the most alive I’ve felt at the movies in quite some time.

“Good Time” sees the Safdies continuing their exploration of those whom society has deemed invisible (homeless, the mentally challenged, deadbeat dads, scam artists, drug dealers). This time, however, the brothers filter their unvarnished docu-vérité aesthetic through a candy-colored genre filter. Their fifth feature is part One-Crazy-Night dark comedy a la “After Hours,” part Race-Against-Time street thriller, and part earnest social drama. You’d think this alchemy of ingredients would result in an unwieldy final product, but the assuredness of the storytelling in “Good Time” is one of the most genuinely shocking things about it. There is more unhomogenized filmmaking energy in the entirety of “Good Time” than just about any so-called blockbuster “thrill ride” from this year. What’s more is that the movie’s explosive bursts of visual poetry work to service a story that is grimly arresting at first and, by the movie’s conclusion, genuinely and unironically heartbreaking.

Much has been made of Robert Pattinson’s physical transformation here. In “Good Time,” the famously handsome British actor does his damndest to look gross: he dyes his hair platinum-blonde (something that idiotic criminals on the run always seem to do when they wish to go incognito) and dons a series of urban streetwear pieces (Ecko, Roc-A-Wear) that are about ten years behind the times. Throughout the film, he is gaunt, feverish, ferociously determined. At one point, his character idly mumbles that he believes he was a dog in a past life. It’s a throwaway moment played for a dark laugh, but it may also be telling: cutting through the blistering, neon-soaked fantasia of “Good Time” is a shocking (and shockingly moving) story about twisted brotherly love. Come for the drug trips and back alley beatdowns, stay for the waterworks near the end.

In “Good Time,” Pattinson plays Constantin “Connie” Nikas: a perpetually-agitated, fast-talking hood who’s always on the make. To call Connie a scumball might be too polite a descriptor, but in spite of his laundry list of ethical shortcomings, he does have a heart. Sort of. Most of Connie’s shabby existence is spent caring for his mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie, who, in addition to directing the film with his brother Josh, also helped to capture the movie’s remarkable sound design), even if it means thoughtlessly busting him out of a state-sanctioned mental health program. In Connie’s eyes, these government-appointed shrinks are the enemy: they want to hurt his brother, and he can’t have that.

Early on, Connie deduces that the only way to save Nick is to get him the hell out of the calamitous cesspool that is their modern-day slice of New York City. To do this, Connie figures, the brothers will have to rob a bank. The heist itself is a quiet, low-key marvel: not a shot is fired, but the sight of a masked construction worker slipping a hand-scrawled note to a bank teller is somehow more unnerving than any shootout could ever be. The fact that Connie and his brother wear masks that make them resemble crude African-American caricatures is not lost on the Safdies, and is only one of the film’s many sly instances of socio-racial commentary.

Of course, the robbery goes horribly wrong: one change of clothes and an exploding dye pack later, the Nikas brothers are on the run again, evading the authorities on foot through the expanse of a bland Midtown mall. Connie, dog that he is, runs and runs and runs until it looks like his feet might give out from under him. Sweet, childlike Nick isn’t so lucky. And so the less fortunate of the two Nikas brothers is then hauled off to Riker’s Island, which the Safdies depict as nothing less than a modern-day hell on earth.

It is at this point that “Good Time” really begins to soar. Hiding out from the authorities and racked with guilt over his brother’s incarceration, Connie begins devising a litany of schemes by which he can save Nick. He takes his rich old lady friend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a bail bondsman, which results in more chaos and confusion. He hides out in the home of a Haitian woman and bonds with her whip-smart daughter, Crystal (played, in an astonishingly lived-in performance, by newcomer Taliah Webster) watching “Cops”. At one point, Connie tries busting his brother out of a hospital after he’s assaulted in prison, but he ends up springing the wrong guy — a goony, mush-mouthed acid dealer named Ray (Safdie regular Buddy Duress, giving the movie’s most memorable performance). It’s not hard to see why Connie is incapable of rescuing his brother from the bowels of Riker’s Island: he’s a desperate nitwit, who is constantly being saved by the fact that he possesses that classic New York City hustler’s instinct to invent new solutions in the face of growing, dire problems.

After Connie has assaulted a security guard at beloved Long Island theme park Adventureland and intercepted a Sprite bottle filled with LSD, there’s absolutely no telling where the rest of his night will go, which turns “Good Time” into unpredictable and essential viewing. The Safdies manage to turn Connie’s nocturnal odyssey into something hallucinatory and beautifully abstract, and yet also something that feels as though it’s happening in real time. I’ve rarely been on the edge of my seat in a movie theater as much as I was in “Good Time,” even if it becomes clear in the last fifteen minutes or so that we more or less know how this story is going to end. “Good Time” is further proof of the old adage that it’s not what a story is about but how it’s about it, and every frame of the Safdie’s new film buzzes and burns with pent-up energy and raucous stylistic ingenuity.

As wonderful as Pattinson is here — and he truly is mesmerizing, even moreso than he was in James Gray’s terrific “The Lost City of Z,” evoking 70’s giants like DeNiro and Pacino — I fear that Benny Safdie’s performance may fly under the radar when compared to the flashiness of his more notable co-star. It is a very difficult thing to portray a mentally challenged individual without resorting to cringe-inducing tics and over-emoting (looking at you, Sean Penn in “I am Sam”), but Safdie’s sensitive, understated turn here is one for the books. He acts mostly with his eyes — innocent, filled with fear, shut off from the world — and his wrenching arc is further fuel for Connie’s gonzo journey through the dark heart of the evening.

Buddy Duress, I’m convinced, is a lost Cassavetes actor out of time: he’s actually done time at Riker’s Island, and Duress possesses the kind of gritty authenticity that no amount of acting school can fake. He’s also — as he was in the grimmer “Heaven Knows What” — breathlessly, effortlessly funny. A second-act monologue that he gives about his first day out of prison (which involves getting blacked out drunk, jumping out of moving cabs, dealing acid at an arcade and, somehow, a subtle re-appropriation of the now-infamous Pepe the Frog) is one of the strangest and most enthralling stretches of pure cinema I’ve seen on a big screen this year. Elsewhere, Jennifer Jason Leigh acquits herself well to the Safdie’s caustic, nerve-chafing sensibilities as Connie’s temperamental sugar mama, and “Captain Phillips” actor Barkhad Abdi has a small but fruitful role as an amusement park security officer of whom Connie runs afoul.

As was the case in “Heaven Knows What,” there is subtext regarding class and social standing layered deftly into the full-throttle trip of “Good Time”. The movie is a white-knuckle genre exercise first and foremost: a psychedelic pulp poem, which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen before. And yet, the Safdies are too compassionate to simply depict the characters jumping through the hoops of an increasingly ludicrous plot merely for the sake of it. During one of the movie’s few quiet scenes, when Connie implores Crystal to turn off a particularly brutal episode of “Cops” by muttering “I don’t wanna see them justify this shit,” it’s not hard to think of police complicity during the recent tragedy in Charlottesville. It’s also hard not to wonder if Connie — who, over the course of the movie, lets several minority characters take the fall for his deplorable actions — even knows that he’s an enabling variable in this same kind of bottom-rung white privilege.

There’s a similarly bitter resolution to a later scene in which Connie, testing the audience’s sympathy for the umpteenth time, lets a character of color take the fall for one of his hare-brained criminal schemes. When the NYPD show up to apprehend said character of color, they ask no questions and never assume Connie’s guilt for one second, even though his face has been plastered all over the evening news. It’s a surprisingly delicate, almost indirect attack on bureaucratic injustice and you don’t have to pick up on it to enjoy the Safdie’s movie as a pure stylistic ride, but it is there.

This year has seen a huge upswing in beautifully mounted, classically minded throwback pictures like “The Beguiled,” “The Lost City of Z” and, more recently, “Dunkirk”. As wonderful as these films are — and as valuable as it is to actively seek out truly analog-minded pictures in our increasingly “content”-dominated cinematic landscape — it is also important to look for hungry young filmmakers who are looking to alter the language of cinema itself. Josh and Benny Safdie are just that, and “Good Time” is one of the year’s masterpieces. It’s a real-deal New York crook classic with a heart of gold, not to mention a soundtrack by electro musician Oneohtrix Point Never that sounds like the 80’s soundtracks of Tangerine Dream twisted into something frightening, fully-formed and utterly, undeniably new. Come to think of it, all those adjectives apply to “Good Time” as well. See it on a big screen, and with the best sound system you can.

On the other end of the New York cinema spectrum, we have Alex Ross Perry’s “Golden Exits”: a film that depicts a world so far removed from the Safdie’s low-down, blue-collar Queens environs that it might as well be another planet.

Whereas the Safdies are drawn to the disenfranchised addicts and hustlers who exist on the bottom of the city’s totem pole, Perry’s characters are often molded in the caste of his heroes Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach. Like those two elder statesman of New York Cinema, Mr. Perry makes brittle, bitter comedy-dramas about financially well-off and intellectually adroit individuals who are nevertheless difficult to warm up to. Whether it’s the incessantly bickering siblings at the heart of his breakout mumblecore chamber piece “The Color Wheel,” the poisonously narcissistic author at the center of “Listen Up, Philip” or the damaged heroine of his Polanski love letter “Queen of Earth,” there’s no doubt that Perry’s characters are dynamic, complex and multi-faceted. This does not, however, mean that mainstream audiences will always enjoy spending time with them.

I’ve found that Perry’s talent was never really in question. He’s a literate student of both American and European cinema who has proven himself capable of writing eloquent dialogue that slyly reveals his character’s most crippling inadequacies and desires. And as a director, he’s just getting better: one need only observe the massive improvement from “The Color Wheel’s” grubby black-and-white D.I.Y. aesthetic to the lush, unnerving formalist technique on display in “Queen of Earth” to see what I’m talking about.

And yet, I’ve found that in many cinephile circles, there is an almost collective caveat regarding Perry’s body of work. Sure, his films are witty and well made, and they occasionally force us to consider things about our own personalities that we’d rather not spend too much time mulling over. And yet, what’s the point of appreciating all this careful consideration of craft if the characters are, to put it bluntly, awful fucking people?

Personally, I’ve never bought this criticism of Perry’s work, just as I’ve never subscribed to the misguided philosophy that all movie heroes and heroines should be fundamentally decent folk. For those who think the jury’s still out on Perry’s gifts as a storyteller, his fifth film “Golden Exits” will do little to shed light on the topic. This is a patience-testing, intentionally vexing and occasionally very interesting film about thwarted desires and domestic ennui that does absolutely nothing to speak to Perry’s naysayers, or win over those who are sick of whimsical character studies about well-off intellectuals who live in improbably expensive Brooklyn lofts. The fact that the film, while undoubtedly being Perry’s least satisfying work to date, contains moments of inspiration and insight should come as no surprise to anyone any of the director’s other film’s. This does, however, make “Golden Exits’” many flaws any easier to accept.

If “Listen Up, Philip’s” acerbic comedy of misery owed a debt to mid-career Woody Allen and “Queen of Earth” told its creepy tale with shades of not only Polanski, but also Fassbinder and Bergman, than “Golden Exits” is the young writer/director’s tribute to the languorous cinema of French director Eric Rohmer. More specifically, Perry’s new film is akin to that older director’s series of “Moral Tales”: films like “My Night at Maud’s” and “Claire’s Knee” that profiled the immense gap that existed between people’s innermost desires and the actions that they ultimately take.

Like characters in a Rohmer film, the well-read bohemians that make up the central cast of “Golden Exits” can seem like great company at a toney dinner party, but they don’t seem to really know what they want. The archivists, record producers and bored urban professionals that constitute Perry’s soggy, sour new drama are in the perpetual process of analyzing their every waking thought and its subsequent action. Who needs psychotherapy when you take up so much space in you own head?

While it’s not hard to see how this brainy approach fits neatly into Perry’s established wheelhouse, it must also be said that the director whom he finds himself emulating and even imitating in some case (Rohmer) ultimately possessed a lightness of touch that is mostly lacking here. For the first time, Perry’s insufferable characters fail to be interesting. In attempting to make a subdued seriocomic look at domestic malaise, Perry has instead made a curious, intriguing and ultimately disappointing film about interminable white creatives who are so busy whining and crying about their latest non-problem that they can’t stop to take a look around and see how good they’ve got it. You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you live in a million-dollar apartment in one of America’s greatest cities. What the hell are you so upset about?

Things get off to an interesting start, at least. Emily Browning plays Naomi; a comely young Australian woman who is first seen crooning a surprisingly lovely rendition of KISS’s disco hit “New York Groove” on the steps of an old Victorian brownstone in Park Slope. Having seen the film, it’s still unclear to me as to whether or not this is merely atmospheric scene-setting on the director’s part, or whether it has some larger relevance to the story. The film’s next scene was when I knew the movie was in trouble: the liberated cinematography of Sean Price Williams (who also shot “Good Time”) feels unusually blocky and static, while the characteristic verbosity of Perry’s characters runs off the rails, draining any interaction of whatever naturalism it might have otherwise possessed.

Naomi is in town to assist in the work of a grumpy archivist named Nick (Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz, last seen in Noah Baumbach’s far superior and far more emotionally generous New York comedy “While We’re Young”), who is busy amassing materials for his late father’s estate. Nick is trapped in a frigid, loveless marriage with a therapist named Alyssa (Chloe Sevigny), whose primary task in the movie seems to be ruefully gazing out windows and musing on the futility of her own posh urban existence. Yawn. Also entrenched in this morass of hurt feelings and unspoken lust are a smarmy record producer named Buddy (Jason Schwartzman, fluent in the director’s rhythms and returning to the Perry fold after “Listen Up, Philip” gave him one of his best roles to date), Buddy’s improbably gorgeous and understanding wife, Jess (Analeigh Tipton, wonderful) and a drifting hipster named Sam (Lily Rabe) who appears to be the only reasonably well-adjusted individual anywhere in sight.

Perry’s previous movies worked so well because he didn’t care two bits if you liked his characters. In fact, in movies like “The Color Wheel” and “Listen Up, Philip,” Perry occasionally actively encourages his audience to root against these people. No such bilious self-awareness colors “Golden Exits,” which is a softer and less serrated version of Perry’s typical style, and also a drastically less engaging one. Still, for those who might be worried that Perry has lost his edge, rest assured that the people who populate “Golden Exits” will legitimately make your skin crawl. They are cloying, cruel, callous, and self-absorbed to a degree that is genuinely alarming. If I found myself at a party with these people, I’d throw myself out the window before they could pop the first bottle of white wine.

At a Q&A Perry participated in after the screening (with renowned film legend Peter Bogdonavich, no less), the director suggested that the movie’s true subject was “lack of communication”. I’m sorry? All the characters in “Golden Exits” do is communicate: they communicate so much, and at such unbelievable length, that you want to strangle them. This is a movie about people who lack the basic human sense of awareness about when to shut the fuck up — which wouldn’t be problematic if the film was a comedy.

Alas, “Golden Exits” is a talky Brooklyn melodrama, though Schwartzman scores some uneasy laughs as the kind of bearded, terminally cool “nice guy” who ghosts a girl after two and a half dates. As the avuncular Nick, Horowitz is game, but badly miscast. The onetime MC was so effervescently charismatic as a stay-at-home dad in “While We’re Young” that it seems counterintuitive to cast him as such a mopey, one-note character. Emilie Browning’s Naomi mostly exists to sing old pop songs when she’s nervous, and gaze dutifully at Nick while he sifts through his father-in-law’s flotsam. That said, the actress makes the most of a nothing part, and ultimately gives the movie’s finest performance. I won’t even go into Mary-Louise Parker’s movie-derailing turn as Alyssa’s horrendous sister, except to say that “Golden Exits” stops dead in its tracks whenever she’s onscreen.

Those of you who have read this site with regularity over the years know that I once pegged Alex Ross Perry to be one of the most interesting directors of his generation. I’ve written about both “Queen of Earth” and “The Color Wheel” here, and “Listen Up, Philip” was in my Top Five movies of 2014. It gives me no joy to tell you that his new movie isn’t very good. Alas, “Golden Exits” is wan and wanting: a limp trifle from a director who has proven himself to be capable of much, much more. The film is saved from awfulness by the stellar contributions of Sean Price Williams, Keegan Dewitt’s evocative and jazzy score, and a handful of powerful scenes. All the same, it’s a trying sit. Still, it’s fascinating to consider that both “Golden Exits” and “Good Time” reflect the same city, with the same occupants. One film reflects an entirely white, privileged and ultimately very narrow world that perhaps only exists in its creator’s considerable imagination. The other depicts the world as it truly is: uncomfortable, real and raw.

Grades: “Good Time,” A. “Golden Exits,” C.