The Safdie Brothers’ Latest Film Is a Classic Crime Story for Our Time

“Good Time,” written by Josh Safdie ('07) and Ronald Bronstein ('08), is a bitterly realistic drama with only one leap out of the narrative framework into a flashback, but, in its images and its tone, it streaks and smears and shreds the screen with a sense of furious subjectivity—that of its characters and of its directors alike. The Safdie brothers had something of a chaotic New York childhood (it’s the subject of the earlier movie “Daddy Longlegs”) and they have a strong sense of the city’s underworld—which is to say, not the literal Mob but the unglamorous world, the world of people who work hard or dull jobs, often at night, the world of people who are in the soul-killing gravitational pull of the judicial system, the world of people for whom subsistence is a daily hustle and whose relationships with friends and family are coarsened and befouled by that hustle—for whom the marshalling of vital energies and strong impulses can be a matter of survival or of devastation.