Safdie Brothers Film Captures Life on the Street

Heaven Knows What, the new film by COM alums Josh and Benny Safdie, earns its R rating for, as the New York Times describes it, “drug use throughout, pervasive strong language, disturbing and violent images, sexuality and graphic nudity.”

The Safdie brothers’ film is a gruelingly realistic drama about the lives of homeless young heroin addicts on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, played mainly by nonactors, some of whom are in fact young heroin addicts on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Like the lives of the addicts, which consist largely of scoring, shooting up, stealing, and panhandling, the film is sometimes hard to watch, and at times seems to be going nowhere. But there’s grim drama to come.