Of lice and men: "Good Time"

By calling their new film Good Time, New York siblings Josh and Benny Safdie may appear to be offering up an olive branch to those who cavilled before their 2014 feature Heaven Knows What, a vérité study of drug addiction that was nothing if not a bad time. Here, by contrast, two emergent writer-directors turn their hands to a wonky sort of thriller, headed by a bona fide movie star, of the kind that will almost always do respectable crossover numbers at your friendly neighbourhood artiplex. Furthermore, it's a film in which two brothers address the matter of fraternal dependency - and thus, believe it or not, does this scuzzy, grungy filmed clusterfuck become perhaps the only 2017 release to owe a certain debt to John Steinbeck. For the latter's Lennie, the Safdies swap in Nick (played by Benny Safdie himself), a slow-witted, quick-tempered young man first seen being liberated from an institution somewhere in the Big Apple by his more impulsive, streetwise brother Connie (Robert Pattinson). Connie's motives, it transpires, aren't entirely selfless: he's rescuing his bro solely to involve him in a bank robbery that goes awry when the junior party is captured by the police. While Nick makes a swift return to custody - in this instance, an actual prison, staffed by real-life prisoners - Connie bids for redemption, setting out over one long, cold night to scrape together the bail money required to spring Nick from hell. Though billed as a good time, this process is not an easy one, and it won't be for everyone.

What the Safdies have mastered over the course of their first, increasingly expansive features is a you-are-here immediacy that may just sock you in the gut if the film succeeds in keeping you in your seat: Good Time duly offers up yards of jittery handheld cinematography (care of the versatile cinematographer Sean Price Williams) punctuated by sweatily tight close-ups, all set to a pounding electro score by Daniel Lopatin in his guise of Oneohtrix Point Never. Where Heaven Knows What suffered from the low energy of its junkie characters and a draining sense we were merely circling some plughole, the new film is plugged directly into the livewire mania of certain low-end career criminals, and accordingly proceeds at merry-go-round speed, never letting up long enough to let us get off. One way of approaching Good Time is as a very black joke in which one good turn (brother rescuing brother) is gradually undone by a series of lamentably bad moves (Connie smuggling the wrong person out of hospital, or seducing a teenage girl to cover his own sorry behind). Pattinson plays his part in this, all his wiggling allowing the audience to gauge Connie's flawed intelligence: smart enough to just about get out of stuck on a moment-by-moment basis, yet consistently dumber than his brother when it comes to seeing the bigger picture. (A less ironic title would perhaps have involved frying pans and fire.) 

There are, however, limitations to the Safdie approach, and as revealed here, they make me question Film Twitter's assertion that the brothers might be American cinema's second coming. Is Good Time, black joke that it is, funny - in the same way that, say, such nocturnes as After Hours or Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies are funny? For a while, yes; after that, not so much. The collateral damage Connie racks up in the course of his nightshift becomes as wearying as all the high-speed pile-ups in the Fast & Furious movies, so by the time characters start throwing themselves out of windows come the final reel, Good Time is occasioning no more than numbed shrugs. As a film, it's not so much building towards a pay-off as headed towards the pavement or a brick wall at a rate of knots, and a dull-splat realisation that no good can come of these characters, which sorta begs the question: why follow them in the first place? (Hipster nihilism is one phrase that springs to mind.) The film clearly counts as another modest step forward for its makers in finding an audience and a fanbase, and indeed for Patterson in once more shaking and scuzzing up his teen-dream image: bless him for continuing to look beyond the usual scripts and seek out the unlikeliest of directors to nudge the Twilight fanbase towards. Yet I can go no further with Good Time than I could with Heaven Knows What, offering but cautious commendation: it wouldn't surprise me if someone had a go at it under the Trades Description Act.

Good Time opens in selected cinemas from Friday.