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Law And Order is a favourite TV show for a lot of people in this film. But what can those two exotic concepts mean to them? The Safdie brothers have directed a sometimes funny, sometimes bewildering odyssey of crime-chaos and crime-incompetence, co-written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein; they borrow some tropes and images from Elmore Leonard.

It’s a New York story with a bizarrely picaresque feel and a pulsingly obtrusive synth score. There are big grainy close-ups and punch-ups, a prison fight, a bail-bond office scene and it all kicks off with a tremendously exciting bank robbery. But Good Time encourages its audience to invest emotionally in characters who disappear from the plot – the film appears simply to mislay them in its headlong forward rush, and loses its own direction in ways that aren’t entirely intentional. Of course, it makes a kind of sense as the film is about loss – and losers. These are people who are slithering down the slope of their own bad luck and bad choices. The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.

It’s a story of two brothers. Nik Nikas, played by Ben Safdie himself, is in an outpatient facility for his learning disability; Connie Nikas, played by Pattinson, is the guy looking out for him, in the time-honoured manner: Connie is a tough guy and fledgling career criminal. They are both living with their long-suffering grandmother, who appears to be a first-generation incomer from Greece, although she is tiring of their violence and waste.

Connie has a plan: he and Nik will execute a bank robbery together, and at first it seems as if Nik’s placid condition means that he can stay cool in exactly the right way – at least partly because he may not fully understand what they are doing together in the bank, wearing masks and collecting a bagful of cash.

Things go horribly wrong and the Safdies orchestrate the situation superbly, from the bank-teller’s utterly uninterested reaction to being robbed, to the thrilling chase scene. Connie finds that he must pull off a second robbery – he must heist his own brother from the prison hospital. This also goes uproariously sideways, and Connie gets mixed up for a long, long period of time in someone else’s unedifying criminal mess – which is diverting and of course there is a point to this. The wayward structure of Good Time says something about the nature of crime which other more shapely, unitary narratives perhaps do not grasp. But the film loses sight of the brothers and their bond and the final sequence does not altogether re-establish its thematic good faith.

There are some great set-piece scenes. Connie, in his predatory and exploitative, way has been leeching off a girlfriend, Corey – a very good but all too brief performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh – who herself is living with an exasperated elderly parent. The idea of criminal adventurers being parasitically reliant on the safety net provided by older law-abiding relatives is in fact a shrewdly observed motif.

Leigh is very funny as her character Corey keeps up her delusional whining about the vacation that Connie has promised her in a Costa Rica hotel with the fancy swim-up bar in its luxury pool. But of course all he wants is her cash – to put up Nik’s bond money. He and the movie will dispense with her soon enough.

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The film shows that Connie is a smart guy, in his way. He cleverly tricks the cop guarding his brother and ingeniously bamboozles the police who pick him up at an amusement park. But it is all heading nowhere: Connie’s determination is that of someone running up the down escalator of life – but of course he disdains sympathy and in fact derides a fellow criminal for being an undisciplined screw-up, little knowing that these accusations basically apply to him too.

Good Time is a poignantly ironic title: it means the reduction of jail time for good behaviour. Any time spent outside prison is good time, although the law-breakers here do not quite appreciate this and seem to be living in a kind of jail ante-chamber. It is a sombre, downbeat movie whose initial thrills give way to sadness.