Connie Nikas robs a bank with his mentally disabled brother Nick, and everything goes wrong. That’s the first ten minutes. The remaining ninety follow Connie through one increasingly desperate night in Queens as he tries to get Nick out of jail, and every decision he makes creates a new catastrophe. The Safdie Brothers’ Good Time is a film that grabs you by the collar in its opening scene and doesn’t let go until the credits roll, and by the end, you’ll feel like you’ve run a marathon without leaving your seat.
Robert Pattinson plays Connie with a manic energy that announced to the world he was far more than a former teen heartthrob. Connie is smart in the way that street-level criminals are smart: quick on his feet, instinctively manipulative, able to read people and exploit their kindness or weakness in seconds. He’s also fundamentally selfish in ways the film doesn’t bother to disguise. He drags his brother into a crime Nick can’t consent to or understand, then spends the rest of the film convincing himself and everyone around him that everything he’s doing is for Nick’s benefit. It isn’t. It never was.
Pattinson’s Transformation and the Safdies’ Controlled Panic
Pattinson’s performance here is a revelation. He plays Connie with a physical intensity that makes every scene crackle. His movements are quick and agitated, his eyes constantly scanning for exits and opportunities. The character is deeply unsympathetic on paper, but Pattinson makes him compelling through sheer charisma and commitment. You don’t root for Connie. You can’t look away from him. There’s a difference, and Pattinson understands it perfectly.
The Safdie Brothers direct with a style that feels like controlled panic. The camera stays close to faces, the editing is jagged and propulsive, and the score by Oneohtrix Point Never is a synth-heavy heartbeat that never lets the tension drop. The visual palette leans heavily on neon pinks and sickly yellows, giving Queens a hallucinatory quality that matches Connie’s increasingly unhinged state. This isn’t a pretty New York. It’s a New York of hospital waiting rooms, bail bonds offices, and amusement park storage facilities, all rendered in colors that feel like a fever dream.
The supporting cast, largely composed of non-professional actors, gives the film a texture of lived-in authenticity that professional performers might not achieve. Benny Safdie plays Nick with a sensitivity that makes his vulnerability painfully clear from the opening scene, where a therapist is trying to reach him and Connie bursts in to pull him away. Buddy Duress, who plays a recently released convict that Connie encounters midway through the night, brings an unhinged energy that matches Pattinson’s and creates some of the film’s most volatile scenes. Jennifer Jason Leigh appears briefly as Connie’s girlfriend, and even in limited screen time, she conveys the exhaustion of being in orbit around someone this destructive.
The film’s set pieces, including a dye-pack explosion during the bank robbery, a frantic escape from a hospital, and a nightmarish sequence in an amusement park, are staged with a precision that belies their chaotic appearance. Every scene escalates logically from the previous disaster, and the Safdies have a gift for putting their characters in situations where every option is bad and the worst option is the one that gets chosen.
The Relentlessness That Leaves No Room to Breathe
Good Time’s greatest strength is also its limitation: the film is exhausting. The pace never relents, the tension never drops, and there’s no scene that functions purely as relief or reflection. For ninety minutes, you’re locked into Connie’s frantic perspective, and while that creates an incredibly immersive experience, it also means the film operates on a narrow emotional register. Anxiety, desperation, brief flashes of false hope, then more anxiety. If you’re not on board with that rhythm, the film offers nothing else.
The film’s treatment of Nick raises questions it doesn’t fully address. Connie’s exploitation of his brother is presented clearly, and the film doesn’t pretend that Connie’s motives are noble. But Nick himself remains somewhat underdeveloped as a character. He exists primarily to motivate Connie’s actions and to serve as the moral weight that Connie ignores. The opening and closing scenes with a therapist provide context for Nick’s inner life, but the bulk of the film treats him as an object to be rescued rather than a person with his own agency.
The secondary characters that Connie encounters during his night of chaos are vivid but disposable. He moves through people’s lives like a wrecking ball: using them, discarding them, and moving on without a second thought. This is the point, and the film makes it well, but it means that characters who seem promising, like a sixteen-year-old girl whose grandmother’s apartment Connie hides in, are introduced and abandoned before they can fully register. The film sacrifices depth for momentum, which is a legitimate trade-off but one that leaves some scenes feeling thinner than they could be.
The audio mix is aggressive, with the electronic score sometimes overpowering the dialogue. This is clearly intentional, creating a sensory experience that mirrors Connie’s overwhelming night, but it can make certain plot-critical exchanges difficult to follow. The Safdies prioritize feel over clarity, and viewers who want to track every narrative detail may find themselves occasionally lost.
The Connie Problem: Charisma Without Conscience
The most unsettling thing about Good Time is how effectively it demonstrates the damage a charismatic person can do when they have no moral center. Connie isn’t a criminal mastermind. He’s an improviser who survives by making other people believe in him just long enough to take what he needs. He convinces a stranger to post bail. He talks his way past hospital security. He persuades a teenager to help him. Each of these interactions works because Connie is genuinely charming and because the people he encounters are predisposed to help someone who seems confident and urgent.
The film’s final sequence brings this dynamic into sharp focus, showing the consequences not for Connie but for the people he’s burned through over the course of the night. It’s a sobering conclusion to what has been, up to that point, a thrilling ride, and it forces the audience to reckon with the fact that they’ve spent ninety minutes hoping a deeply selfish man would succeed at the expense of everyone around him.
Should You Watch Good Time?
If you want a crime thriller that operates at maximum intensity from start to finish and you’re interested in seeing Robert Pattinson at his most electric, this is essential. The Safdie Brothers created a template with this film that influenced a generation of indie thrillers, and it remains one of the most visceral cinema experiences of the 2010s.
Skip it if you need likable protagonists or if sustained anxiety isn’t your idea of entertainment. The film offers no relief from its tension, and its moral perspective is deliberately uncomfortable. The visual and audio intensity can also be overwhelming for viewers who are sensitive to rapid editing and loud, abrasive sound design. This is a movie that assaults your senses by design, and that approach isn’t for everyone.
The Verdict on Good Time
Good Time is filmmaking as adrenaline injection. The Safdie Brothers proved with this film that they could create mainstream tension with indie sensibilities, and Robert Pattinson delivered a performance that permanently reshaped his career trajectory. It’s not a comfortable film, and it’s not trying to be. The narrow emotional range and relentless pacing will alienate some viewers, and the film’s refusal to develop anyone beyond Connie means it sacrifices some depth for propulsion. But on its own terms, which are intense, morally unsparing, and formally daring, it’s one of the most accomplished thrillers of its decade. The final scene reframes everything that came before and lingers long after the synths fade out.