Robert Pattinson's New Movie Is Deeply Ugly - And Unbelievably Stylish

Robert Pattinson in Good Time

Connie Nikas, the Queens criminal at the heart of Good Time, the new film from directors Joshua and Benny Safdie, spends most of the movie wearing someone else’s clothes. Over the course of one long, harrowing night, Connie (played by Robert Pattinson) cycles through a bank-robbery disguise, a stolen security guard’s uniform, and a shiny silver Pelle Pelle jacket the ‘90s would very much like to have back, among other outfits. Everything in the film—clothing, morality, characterization—is deeply layered, fractured, and complex. It’s all in service of genre: Good Time is a heist movie, and a grippingly intense, color-that-knuckles-get-after-white one at that. But it’s also a drama of identity, and of privilege—and how the latter lets certain people cycle through as many of the former as they need to make it through the night, or the month, or a lifetime of just-under-the-radar crime.

There are plenty of Safdie brother tricks in Good Time that allows the movie to function so flexibly and dramatically: hyperstylized direction that never feels forced, captivating performances from stars and nonactors alike, a score that made me want to puke in a good way. But for my money, just about the most interesting thing in Good Time—and the element that turns the movie from a pitch-perfect genre exercise into a pitch-dark x-ray of urban life in 2017—is the clothes.

Good Time is not a handsome movie, nor one with a massive budget for production design. But it is a movie that takes clothing seriously: one that recognizes the power that lies in what we wear, and the ways clothes grant and deny privileges to the people who wear them. Also, Good Time looks really fucking cool. At a moment in menswear where up is down, down is up, and nobody’s pants fit, this is a defiantly unpretty movie, acne-scarred and Coogi-sweatered. But not giving a crap is about the coolest thing you can do. Everybody knows that. And on that count, Good Time is the most purely stylish film I’ve seen in years.

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