The film begins with a continuous four-minute take that starts on a television screen showing a Hindi soap opera and pulls out into the street, where armed gangs are furiously searching for a man, gunning down anyone in their path who might be his ally. They bomb his house. When the pressure becomes too much to bear, there is a cut, and with it, an exhale. But there is no loss of tension. The film powers forward, relentless, for the next five hours.

Yes, “Gangs of Wasseypur” is over five hours long, which is why it has almost always been exhibited in two parts (Lincoln Center is screening it in one part). This may, unavoidably, intimidate some. There is no other way to tell a story of this magnitude, covering eight decades of life in the town of Wasseypur in northeast India, examining the intersection of organized crime, capitalism, and civic government in as exacting detail as it does, in any less time. This is without even mentioning the scale on which Kashyap examines the futility of revenge over three whole generations, which is rendered all the more tragic by the film's sheer scale.

After the opening sequence, set in the present day, the story jumps back to 1941. With the aid of narration—voiced by a supporting character who plays a crucial role in the story over the years—the history of Wasseypur is laid forth. It is a key coal mining center in its region, and this becomes the focus of a rivalry between three parties: industrialist Ramadhir Singh, who takes control of the mines after India's independence from Britain; the Qureshi, who traditionally controlled Wasseypur; and Shahid Khan, a miner who was banished by the Qureshi for robbing trains, only to return to Wasseypur under false pretenses with the intent of stealing the mines from Singh. The lattice of interlocking conflicts and allegiances beginning with this dynamic end up lasting all the way to the 21st century, and never at any point cease to fascinate.

The key to this is the way Kashyap builds his overall story out of the accumulation of smaller stories. An entire life can be extrapolated from almost every character who appears over the course of the film, and several of them could easily have entire movies in which their storyline is the center. Yet at no point is there an issue of diffuse focus, or of misplaced importance. The performances, across the board, are magnificent, with special credit to be paid to Khan family matriarch Richa Chaddha, and her second son (and star of the second part of the film) played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, whose work and character arc in “Gangs of Wasseypur” defy superlative. Everything is exactly as it should be, storywise, and the total is an astonishing feat, worthy of discussion alongside Coppola's first two “Godfather” films, or Leone's “Once Upon a Time in America.”