Five Star

Taking his first steps in the New York underworld, John is taken in by Primo. The tattooed gangster who’s done plenty of time, warns John that a little mistake can mean a long sentence. John, whose father was murdered some years ago, knows what it means to be short on luck. In his second full-length feature, Keith Miller takes a documentary approach to peer into the seedy Brooklyn netherworld. He is more interested in the daily lives of his two lead characters than mafia score-settling. While John is only starting to learn the laws of the street, his mentor knows them too well to back out. The director successfully frees the classic motifs of gangster cinema from the convention’s constraints by using a para-documentary narrative: improvised dialogues, a story inspired by actual events from Brooklyn, and amateur actors tie Miller’s film to the early achievements of John Cassavetes or the renowned Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett.