Heaven Knows What

One of the extra features on the Blu-ray release of "Heaven Knows What," titled "A Hot Two Weeks," is a making-of-the-movie featurette elevated by a novel flourish: Instead of recounting how directors Benny and Josh Safdie met their lead actress Arielle Holmes, the short depicts a dramatization of their first encounter as though it were a scene in a movie. (Various pieces of interview footage and production clips fill "Hot Two Weeks" out.) On its own, the short is merely diverting. But its indicative of what makes "Heaven Knows What" so unendingly captivating: It always feels a little too real to be fiction.

Holmes was not an actress when she first met the Safdie brothers; she was a heroin addict. She was infused with an "amour fou," by way of her co-dependent relationship with fellow addict Ilya (played by Caleb Landry Jones). At the director's behest, Holmes collected her memories of street life into an unpublished memoir ("Mad Love in New York City"), and "Heaven Knows What," wherein she plays a barely-fictionalized version of herself, is billed as that memoir's adaptation. Holmes, incredibly, spares not an iota of ego: It's marked deepest by the carnal smiles she lets out at the sight of fights and destruction. You could call this fiction. You could also call it self-flagellation.

In narrative terms, "Heaven Knows What" harkens back to the "women's pictures" of Old Hollywood, where strong women found themselves caught in dramas that were staged at the intersection of romantic passion and class warfare. Harley, Holmes' analogue, is caught therein: The helpless "black-metal dirt-bomb" Ilya excites her, but Mike (Buddy Duress, another non-professional actor) is the one who catches her when she comes down. He's a heroin dealer, and he has bags to spare for the nights when she comes home empty-handed.

The Safdie's, working with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, often watch the cyclical drama play out via long-lens compositions set up blocks away from the action. They don't pretend to understand the lifestyles being depicted. Instead, their distanced shots emphasize Harley's marginalized status even further: We see extras walk by the streetside scenes without even acknowledging her existence. Window ads for Dunkin Donuts coffee and McDonald's sandwiches conceal the faces and bodies of our stars. The film itself knows that us viewers probably have more in common with the working class walking by these frames than we do with the people stuck inside them.

The Blu-ray release of the film includes a few other extras, in addition to the aforementioned documentary. There's a music video for a featured track by Ariel Pink, and there are also about nine minutes' worth of deleted scenes. Some of them are actually as strong as any other in the movie. But the film's sound design (droning over each scene, rendering concepts of linear time null and moot) wouldn't be worth sacrificing to any surplus scenes. "Heaven Knows What" looks like improvisation, and non-fiction, and surveillance. But then it manages to turn all of that into opera.

"Heaven Knows What"
Blu-ray
$26.99
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