Martin Scorsese, a director frequently described as America’s greatest living filmmaker, released his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, the same year. He cast himself as a gangster in an uncredited cameo. In his 1973 breakthrough, Mean Streets, he did the same thing. No director is as definitively associated with the gangster picture as Scorsese: not Francis Ford Coppola, not Brian De Palma, not even Scorsese’s hero, Howard Hawks, who directed the 1932 Scarface. In the 46 years since Mean Streets, a movie that reinvented the American gangster film nearly as consequentially as Bonnie and Clyde had, Scorsese has dealt with organized crime either directly or obliquely in many of his best-known pictures, from Raging Bull (1980) to Goodfellas (1990) to Casino (1995) to Gangs of New York (2002) to The Departed (2006).

Now comes The Irishman, a three-and-a-half-hour epic starring the Scorsese mainstays Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel, as well as troupe newcomer Al Pacino. It will surely draw comparisons to all of the works listed above, family resemblances that it both embraces and transcends.

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If Warshow was correct in identifying the gangster films of the early 1930s as subversive critiques of relentless American optimism, the genre’s resurgence in the late ’60s and early ’70s, as the Vietnam War and widespread mistrust of institutions of power tore the country apart, was rooted in the fact that audiences now felt at home in the movies’ cynicism. That familiarity, of course, has only intensified in recent years: As I was watching The Irishman during its September premiere at the New York Film Festival, a story was developing about the president of the United States soliciting a “favor” from a foreign government, a request that sounded an awful lot like the proverbial offer that can’t be refused. Yet the gangster picture itself now seems to be in its twilight, and its legacy—at the movies, but also in American life—is at the center of Scorsese’s deeply reflective film. The Irishman feels like an apotheosis, an elegy, and a penance all at once.

The Irishman is based on Charles Brandt’s 2004 best seller, I Heard You Paint Houses, which chronicled the life and deeds of the career crook Frank Sheeran. Before his death in 2003, Sheeran confessed to Brandt that he had been responsible for a staggering number of Mob-ordered killings, most notably the 1975 “disappearance” of the legendary Teamsters-union president Jimmy Hoffa. (The veracity of Sheeran’s confessions has been widely disputed.) The Irishman’s central story is the decades-long friendship between Sheeran and Hoffa, a relationship defined by mutually beneficial corruption, real love, and inevitable tragedy.

In many ways, The Irishman is a capstone work, drawing from the American gangster-film tradition at large as well as Scorsese’s own filmography. The film opens with a one-two punch of Goodfellas references. A long tracking shot through a nursing home evokes the earlier film’s famed “Copa shot,” which slowly took viewers into the Copacabana club in New York. The camera then settles on De Niro as a geriatric Frank Sheeran, before Frank’s narration quickly shifts us to a flashback, a move reminiscent of the way Goodfellas’ own narrator, Henry Hill, introduces his story. (“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”) The film has the narrative zip and humor of The Wolf of Wall Street (a gangster film in spirit if not quite in content) and the sprawl of Casino and The Departed. It also has De Niro, who is in nearly every scene, calling up memories of past collaborations such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.