Laws of Gravity (1992, Nick Gomez) (Patreon)

75/100

Second or (more likely) third viewing, last seen sometime in the early '90s. Seems like it's been largely forgotten—perhaps because Gomez' feature-film career stalled some 20 years ago, perhaps because the logline suggests yet another Mean Streets knockoff (a common criticism at the time). To quote Michael Atkinson, though—and I wouldn't be so lazy were his observation not 100% correct and fundamentally unimprovable—"Laws of Gravity almost scans as the 'true story' Mean Streets adapted and stylized with expressive lighting, rock ‘n roll, and religious iconography." I'd place this movie in the 99th percentile for sheer authenticity; it's unclear to me how much of it was scripted vs. improvised, and Gomez hired mostly professional actors (including Peter Greene and Edie Falco when both were still unknown), but every moment feels raw and unmediated, as if genuinely captured on the fly. Part of the credit goes to D.P. Jean de Segonzac, who pioneered the sort of extemporaneous handheld intimacy that soon thereafter became the indie norm, and which few others execute remotely as well. But this is mostly one of those miraculous exercises in verisimilitude that somehow threads the needle between documentary-level realism and compelling dramaturgy. Even when, say, Frankie tosses out a line that sounds potentially written, calling someone "a Bazooka-chewin', non-comic-readin' f*gg*t," it's immediately followed by Jon's credibly confused reaction ("Bazooka...what?"), and then quickly swallowed up by another pathetic threat display. Revisiting the film now, I thought constantly not of Mean Streets but of Uncut Gems—it pulls off the same harrowing trick of constantly escalating tension even during ostensible lulls, and has almost exactly the same abrupt ending (albeit minus Gems' element of surprise regarding the instant at which it finally, inevitably occurs). If I don't love it quite as much as I once did, that may simply be because I originally saw it just 18 days after I moved to New York City, and was bowled over by an awareness that the unruly world onscreen was where I now lived. If you're a New Yorker, and have never seen Laws of Gravity, check it out. (Available on Amazon Prime as I write this.) Not only because it's terrific, but also because you will not believe that that was Williamsburg.