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Connie Nikas, the Queens criminal at the heart of Good Time, the new film from directors Joshua and Benny Safdie, spends most of the movie wearing someone else’s clothes. Over the course of one long, harrowing night, Connie (played by Robert Pattinson) cycles through a bank-robbery disguise, a stolen security guard’s uniform, and a shiny silver Pelle Pelle jacket the ‘90s would very much like to have back, among other outfits. Everything in the film—clothing, morality, characterization—is deeply layered, fractured, and complex. It’s all in service of genre: Good Time is a heist movie, and a grippingly intense, color-that-knuckles-get-after-white one at that. But it’s also a drama of identity, and of privilege—and how the latter lets certain people cycle through as many of the former as they need to make it through the night, or the month, or a lifetime of just-under-the-radar crime.
There are plenty of Safdie brother tricks in Good Time that allows the movie to function so flexibly and dramatically: hyperstylized direction that never feels forced, captivating performances from stars and nonactors alike, a score that made me want to puke in a good way. But for my money, just about the most interesting thing in Good Time—and the element that turns the movie from a pitch-perfect genre exercise into a pitch-dark x-ray of urban life in 2017—is the clothes.
Good Time is not a handsome movie, nor one with a massive budget for production design. But it is a movie that takes clothing seriously: one that recognizes the power that lies in what we wear, and the ways clothes grant and deny privileges to the people who wear them. Also, Good Time looks really fucking cool. At a moment in menswear where up is down, down is up, and nobody’s pants fit, this is a defiantly unpretty movie, acne-scarred and Coogi-sweatered. But not giving a crap is about the coolest thing you can do. Everybody knows that. And on that count, Good Time is the most purely stylish film I’ve seen in years.
Technically, the movie employed two costume designers: Miyako Bellizzi and Mordechai Rubinstein. (GQ readers might recognize Rubenstein as Mr. Mort, the longtime street-style photographer and fashion-world gadfly.) But as conversations with the two of them revealed, this wasn’t costume design as it is typically practiced. This was something different: a little bit madcap, a little bit postmodern art project, a lot of run and gun. Early in the process, Bellizzi, Rubinstein, and the Safdies would take and share photos of guys they’d see on New York City streets. "Josh is walking on the street and sends me a photo of a guy walking up the stairs on the train in Queens," Rubinstein recalls, "and I'm like, Oh shit, that's amazing. And then I'll send him a photo of someone I saw going down the escalator at the ACE Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, and he's like, Buy that coat." They were looking for something specific—a broken-in, blue-collar, streetwise scruffiness.
“The biggest compliment that I can ever be paid when making a film is the adjective ‘lived in,’” Josh Safdie tells me. “That's really what you want to strive toward, is something that just feels like things belong.” That meant going deep into Connie’s world, and figuring out how to turn a movie star into a low-rent dirtbag, one who drags his mentally handicapped brother into a bank robbery, sees his brother arrested, and spends the next 24 hours trying to drum up bail money when things go wrong.
This was not a simple task. “To the world, he's a certain type of person,” Bellizzi says of Pattinson. “How can we completely fuck everything up? We had to completely change this guy. We were like, What should we do? Should we change his hair? We gave him pimples. He's not supposed to be hot. He's not supposed to be cool looking.”
Connie’s not-coolness extended to his wardrobe. Good Time is full of strange, ugly clothes with an undeniable charm. "We have such similar style," Rubinstein says. "Maybe not what we wear, but what we wanted. We love Southpole. We love the fake stuff so much." Another thing they love: clothes that look as if they’ve been worn by longshoremen for decades. In one instance, this was exactly the case. “We had a really hard time finding that 'hero' jacket,” Safdie says, referring to the high-visibility orange work jacket—with built-in flotation device—that Pattinson spends a portion of the movie wearing. Until, that is, Safdie bumped into it. “One day I was on my way to the office in Queensbridge. I was buying cigarettes at a bodega next to the train,” he narrates. (“I’ve since quit,” Safdie explains.) “And in front of me is this guy in this jacket, this orange jacket, that was just perfectly worn.” He texted with his costume designers, and decided to make an offer: $60, plus a new coat. (“It was kind of cold out,” Safdie explains.) Naturally, he didn’t have any cash, or an ATM card. (“It’s a long story,” Safdie explains.) So he had to walk this guy back to the film’s production office. “And now i'm walking with him through a very desolate part of Long Island City near Queensbridge,” Safdie says, “and he's starting to think that this is all some type of weird hoax.” Safdie pulled out his phone, Googled himself, and reassured his new pal that, no, he wasn’t trying to hoax him. They made it to the office, Safdie forked over the cash and a new coat, and had his new hero.
It is a strong jacket, easily worth the $60, and calls to mind nothing so much as the anti-fashion labels like Vetements and Balenciaga sell for ten times that amount. But Good Time doesn’t suffer from the same curdled irony and muddled class politics as Demna Gvasalia’s designs do. The film is clear about its own values, and Connie’s. His ill-fitting coats aren’t a pose, and they aren’t cool. They’re useful.
Epic as the coat may be, Connie spends most of the movie out of it, and that’s when the way Good Time uses its costumes crystallizes. The bank robbery that occurs early on sets the tone: Connie and his younger brother Nick (played by Josh’s brother and co-director Benny Safdie) wear the neon mesh garb of construction workers, along with outsized, exaggerated masks modeled after black men. They are anonymous, but also striking. And the message is hard to miss: they are using race and class as a disguise. Josh explains that, in doing research for the film, he’d come across a con man apprehended with a book—Disguise Techniques: Fool All of the People Some of the Time. So he bought it. “The big thing I took away from that book is that municipal workers are often the most invisible to pedestrians,” he says. “And furthermore, there was this weird paragraph about how the louder you are, the easier it is to blend in.”
Nick and Connie make it out of the bank with tens of thousands of dollars in a duffle bag. Connie slips his mask and jacket off, but Nick struggles with his. It’s illuminating: Connie will spend the rest of the movie shuffling in and out of stolen identities and borrowed costumes, playing on his marks’ expectations and assumptions. Nick, meanwhile, opens and closes the film in the same Southpole puffer jacket: where his brother is a canny sociopath, Nick is just a white boy from Queens who listens to hip hop.
The Safdies sustain this game of coded cat-and-mouse for the duration of the film. Later, Connie trespasses in an amusement park to find a hidden bottle of Sprite dosed with acid, hoping to sell it off for bail money. When Connie knocks out the guard on duty, force-feeds him the acid-Sprite, and steals his uniform, we know he’ll get away with it. And we know that the cops who respond to the guard’s earlier calls will be perfectly willing to take Connie at his word. They haul away the black security guard without a second thought.
“That's the long-lineage of the good-looking American criminal,” Safdie says, “who uses his looks to his advantage.” Only here, that idea is updated, charged with a politics of race and class that feels deeply resonant in 2017. The costs of this kind of performance—the constant climbing in and out of identities, the sloughing off of the lives of other people—clatter to the fore in the fim’s staggering finale. The lesson is clear: If you look like the right kind of person, you can get away with almost anything.
It’s another shot, though, that stays in my head. After the robbery, the brothers ditch their workwear. Connie is wearing an Ecko hoodie, layered over one from the early-aughts streetwear brand Enyce. It might just be another disguise. But it feels like something larger: the clothes of a guy who, Safdie explains, might have worked at a car dealership in Yonkers before getting fired—and then arrested—for stealing cars. The clothes of a guy from a disappearing New York. The clothes of a life lived on the margins of a great city. The clothes of a man who wears a longshoreman’s jacket long after jobs have disappeared from the port. The clothes of a man a decade behind on trends, on his savings, on his career, on his life. Connie throws the sweatshirts in the trash.
