Heaven Knows What

The life of homeless heroin addicts in New York City receives gritty treatment in this cinema vérité effort from filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, based on an unpublished memoir-novel by Arielle Holmes. Holmes plays a version of herself named Harley, hopelessly in love with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), a self-destructive druggie who treats her—and everybody else—like dirt. After Ilya harangues Harley for some imagined slight, he says that if she really loved him, she'd have killed herself by now. So she scrounges up a razor blade and slits her wrist as he looks on. Harley is taken off to Bellevue but upon her release takes up with a voluble dealer who expects her to work the streets for her daily fix. Eventually, Ilya returns, surly and brutal as ever, and Harley winds up helping him steal and resell stuff from convenience stores in order to raise cash for bus tickets to Florida. Heaven Knows What is undeniably potent stuff, profiting from the mixture of professional actors like Jones, who exhibits frightening intensity, and amateurs such as Holmes, who exudes natural charisma. Unfortunately, the end result is little more than a wallow in nihilism—a grim series of snapshots in place of a meaningful narrative. Still, as a sketch of an often ignored subculture of urban America, this should be considered a strong optional purchase. (F. Swietek)