"Good Time" is a crooks-on-the-run movie which cuts out almost everything but the running.
It begins with Constance "Connie" Nikas pulling brother Nick out of a therapy session to help with a bank robbery. Nick is mentally disabled; Connie has vague, "Of Mice and Men" dreams of getting enough money to buy a farm somewhere, or at least to get the two of them as far away from Queens as possible.
Except they will spend the next day most tearing through that borough, jumping in and out of jails, hospitals, and other people's homes at full speed. And never, really, getting anywhere.
Brothers Ben and Joshua Safdie have made a number of microbudgeted movies, none of which ever really broke out of the tiny arthouse/highbrow critic circuit. Their films often have a strong interest in marginal characters and feature hurried, homely camerawork.
"Good Time" is in that tradition, but with a couple of names - Robert Pattinson as Connie and Jennifer Jason Leigh as his sometime girlfriend, Corey. Both elevate the material enormously.
Pattinson - even scruffier than usual, but with an authentic New York accent and determined stare - is pure, panicked intensity. And the often underutilized Leigh only makes you regret all the movies she hasn't made -- she is immediately in the moment, daring from emotional peak to peak like a firefly.
But while Leigh's able to quickly sketch out a character - damaged, romantic, erratic - Pattinson has less to work with. What brought him to this point? What pushes him, beyond a desire to flee?
Clearly, Connie can't plan, can't think beyond the next few minutes - "Good Time" is, if nothing else, a carefully detailed explanation of how one person can consistently, dependably, make the wrong decision. But even if Connie doesn't know where he's going, it'd give his character so much more depth if we knew where he'd been.
Ben Safdie, who co-directed, also plays Connie's brother, Nick, and he overdoes the character's mental disabilities, just a bit. It's one of those times when bringing in a professional performer would have helped - Safdie shows us someone who lives in his own world yet never manages to bring us into it, too.
But the hawk-faced Buddy Duress is absolutely wonderful as a woeful crook who joins up with Connie along the way. Alternatively self-promoting and self-pitying, he's like every neighborhood loser who wouldn't care if you mocked him, or mooched off him, or probably even murdered him -- just so long as you noticed him.
He's the subject of the movie's biggest, if most improbable, joke as well as its darkest, most despairing one, but Connie is the real star of the film, and the movie's point is his desperation - like Sonny in "Dog Day Afternoon," Connie is always thinking, always looking for the next angle. It's not his fault if he never realizes he's stuck in a circle.
Sometimes, unfortunately, the filmmaking itself is just as manic, and desperate, as he is. Everything is lit with neon and shot in shaky closeup; everything is cut abruptly. And the entire thing has a score that sounds like Tangerine Dream got together, snorted a lot of room freshener, and then recorded an album.
And then played it backward.
But Pattinson is striking, and Leigh is marvelous. An interlude in a cheap, empty amusement park ride is marvelously spooky and unsettling. The urban settings, in the dirty corners of a not-yet-gentrified Queens - where the Safdies partly grew up - feel absolutely right.
And if the film doesn't provide the polished power of its various '70s inspirations, in the end "Good Time" delivers exactly that.
Ratings note: The film contains violence, strong language, sexual situations and substance abuse.
Stephen Whitty may be reached at stephenjwhitty@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwhitty. Find him on Facebook.