The Safdie Brothers’ crime drama Good Time opens with a helicopter shot of New York City, a gamble for any film but especially one this strange, cloistered, and intimate. It’s one of the most photographed places in the world, an easy harbor for cliché and forced sentiment, and yet in the brothers’ lens, the setting looks novel and uneasy, like a threatening frontier you’re staring down for the very first time. That effect—of seeing one of the most recognizable places on earth as though it’s brand new—is cemented by the music permeating the shot, an anxious drone perforated by synthesizer arpeggios that sound both retro and bizarrely out of time.
As Oneohtrix Point Never, New York-based electronic composer Daniel Lopatin has often focused on the grotesque and unplaceable. He’s mined vintage advertising, TV documentaries, and corny ’80s pop hits for his alien environments, often juxtaposing barely recognizable melodies with obliterative walls of static. From the ambient waves of Russian Mind to the hard rock-adjacent Garden of Delete, Lopatin’s work has a tendency to displace the listener—to envelop them in a world that looks a lot like the one they’re used to, but threatens to fall apart at the slightest touch.
Lopatin’s body of work makes him uniquely suited to the Safdie Brothers’ filmmaking style, which opts for a deep pathos and an intense humanization of its characters over flashy action sequences. Good Time is ostensibly a crime movie, but it’s full of close-ups on characters’ faces shot with handheld cameras. Its characters aren’t hard-talking badasses, but flawed, pained people scrambling for survival the only way they know how. The story centers on Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, who’s trying to get his brother Nicky, played by director Benny Safdie, out of Rikers Island after a bank robbery goes south. Nicky has unspecified disabilities—he wears hearing aids, and the first time we see him, he’s struggling to complete some kind of psychiatric evaluation—so Connie’s especially protective of him despite leading him directly into danger. The film’s narrative rests on this contradiction. Connie wants nothing more than for his brother to have a good life, even if it means ruining everything on his path to get there.
Lopatin accentuates the Safdie Brothers’ character studies with a palette that will sound familiar to anyone who’s followed the Oneohtrix Point Never discography so far. But the score moves differently from his album work; instead of pursuing moments of trance-like calm or humor, he metes out anxiety measure by measure. Until the final scene, the film is all anxiety—the characters are always in situations where everything could go wrong, and the score teeters on a parallel brink.
Arpeggios run over peals of white noise on “Good Time” and “Hospital Escape/Access-A-Ride”; drum sounds echo into an elevator shaft on “6th Floor” and “Ray Wakes Up.” “The Acid Hits” runs on slippery percussion that echoes the sound of bloodied fists breaking skin. Lopatin weaves dialogue from the movie into the score, creating an effect that’s disarming even before you see the scenes it’s sourced from. Jennifer Jason Leigh screams into the music on “Bail Bonds,” a piece accompanying a scene where her character—an ad hoc girlfriend that Connie manipulates for her family’s money—tries to put a $10,000 charge on her mother’s credit card. “Ray Wakes Up” samples a conversation between a teenage girl and her grandmother that takes place while Connie’s on their couch plotting his next move. Connie’s voice rarely appears in the score; Lopatin instead focuses on the characters that he tricks, coerces, and actively harms on his quest to post bail for his brother.
The score ends with “The Pure and the Damned,” a ballad featuring Iggy Pop that’s unlike anything Lopatin’s produced before (save for an alternate take of the 2010 track “Returnal” with Anohni and Fennesz). In the film, the song plays during the closing credits, which roll not over a black screen but over the story’s ambiguous epilogue. Pop’s lyrics paint a strange heaven, a place where the skies are frozen blue and you can “pet the crocodiles.” “I ain’t going to get there, but it’s a nice dream,” he says between verses. “It’s a nice dream.” He’s accompanied by little more than a piano, a few distant beats, and some muted synth pads. Singing in an alien setting, he sounds like he’s struggling to get the notes out. His vibrato snags here and there, his tone eroded by time. A broken song closes a broken story. Like the best of OPN’s work—and the best soundtrack work in general—the track is heavy with affect without ever telling its listeners exactly how to feel. Good Time invites emotional confusion along multiple vectors. Lopatin’s score opens fissures that let its beauty and ambivalences burrow deep under your skin.
