Heaven Knows What

Studio: Radius-TWC
Directed by Benny and Josh Safdie

May 29, 2015 By Michael Wojtas Web Exclusive

Benny and Josh Safdie are the rare contemporary filmmakers who don’t demand us to like-or even necessarily empathize with-their subjects. If they ask anything of their audience, it’s that we simply observe their characters and let our fascination take us where it may. Of course, when a film’s star happens to be a staggeringly beautiful young transient, who is both a non-professional and a heroin addict playing a lightly fictionalized version of herself, questions of exploitation immediately begin to percolate.

The untrained actress in question is Arielle Holmes, the focal point of the Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What. Holmes plays Harley, a character coping with not only drug addiction and semi-homelessness, but also a tempestuous relationship with her abusive ghoul of a paramour, Ilya. The film’s script, penned by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, is based on Holmes’ own memoir, which has yet to be published. While this small mountain of meta-text might dwarf a lesser film, here it’s no more compelling than what’s actually captured in the frame (as for that tricky question of exploitation, it’s further complicated by the fact that Holmes, now reportedly clean, has used her performance and co-writing credit from this micro-budgeted film as a springboard to begin courting Hollywood).

Holmes is gawkily gorgeous, but if she’s waifish in appearance, she’s also capable of projecting a distressingly hard demeanor as Harley, a character who manipulates the men in her orbit just as easily as Ilya (played by Caleb Landry Jones with frightening, sub-articulate indifference) manipulates her. One extended sequence, in which she shrewdly maneuvers between two hopelessly devoted would-be lovers, plays like a Cassevettes tragedy in miniature. By simply following the peaks, valleys, and plateaus experienced by their protagonist, the Safdies arrive at a hypnotically meandering storytelling style that doesn’t try call attention to its own strangeness.

Heaven Knows What builds on lessons of the duo’s heartbreaking 2013 basketball documentary Lenny Cooke and the zigzagging pace of their last narrative feature, the fine 2009 effort Daddy Longlegs. The film’s images (courtesy of the talented Sean Price Williams, Alex Ross Perry’s go-to cinematographer) are often voyeuristic; eerie long shots looking down from rooftops alternate with bleary close-ups that search Harley’s face as if trying to understand the world behind her enormous doe eyes. If the camera placement often suggests the perspective of a detached, privileged onlooker, the film’s unpredictable rhythms express the characters’ rabid emotional fluctuations, causing the street-level aesthetic to frequently erupt into borderline-surreal territory.

This is immediately apparent in the most violent scenes, such as Ilya goading Harley into a very public suicide attempt, the fiery climax, and Harley’s forcible ejection from a methadone clinic (soundtracked by the engulfing synth work of Isao Tomita). Yet the film’s accumulation of puzzling details can be just as unnerving, and at times, moving. A jovial Hassid Jew gives Harley a $20 bill, simply telling her “being high is good.” Elsewhere, a lingering extreme close-up of Harley’s fingers fruitlessly attempting to thread a needle has an unshakeable undercurrent of madness. And when Ilya is glimpsed sipping a bottle of Dayquil and toting his entire life around in a Toys R Us bag, it feels not like a trash culture signifier in the manner of, say, Larry Clark or Harmony Korine, but a lived-in snapshot of isolation.

Inevitably, Heaven Knows What will be compared to The Panic in Needle Park, a film that also deals with the intermingled love and heroin addictions of young New Yorkers. Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 film displayed plenty of interest in the physical mechanics of heroin use, but much less inquisitiveness when it came to the feelings that motivated the users.

Heaven Knows What, on the other hand, is almost entirely propelled by the ebb and flow of its characters’ ferocious desires. Because of this, it’s perhaps more akin to feverish stories of amour fou such as We Won’t Grow Old Together, A Women Under the Influence, or even Possession. Somehow, the passions that fuel this film are all the more poignant because they manifest in the most unlikely of places, be it a blood-spewing wound created by a homemade throwing star, or (in what is surely the most magical moment of the Safdies’ career), a perfectly incongruous cut from Ilya throwing Harley’s phone into the air to fireworks illuminating a night sky.

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