James Gray’s mob drama Paper Tiger is work of classical Hollywood staging that does something genuinely novel with the genre. The director’s sixth Palme d’Or hopeful — a record for an American filmmaker — strips away the allure of the modern crime flick and replaces it with a tactile sense of danger, in his story of brothers in 1980s Queens getting in well over their heads with the Russian “mafiya.”

Gray’s grandiose saga begins with a fittingly operatic quote, attributed to tragedy maestro Aeschylus: “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.” The pursuit of spoils sans consequence has been at the core of every iconic American gangster picture (The Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas, and so on), but when Paper Tiger begins in 1986 the era of the unfettered American Dream seems all but over. It’s perhaps the last time and place an American gangster picture can be set — that too, just barely — as a combination of Reagan-led deregulation and Gorbachev-era economic crises yields an influx of Russian mobsters into New York, as they search for their piece of the pie.

The film’s protagonists, however, are largely disconnected from that world. Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is a Jewish family man with two sons — college-aged Scott (Gavin Goudey) and the younger Ben (Roman Engel) — and a doting wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), is slowly but surely roped into a redevelopment scheme by his older brother Gary (Adam Driver), a former policeman. Gary has the connections, while Irwin has the engineering know-how, and all he needs to do is advise Gary’s new Russian friends on how to stay on the right side of the law. But before any of these details are broached, Gray introduces us to the characters’ lively dynamic, through family dinners and seemingly mundane interactions, filling the screen with life and love. If something’s going to go wrong (and it surely will), these are the last people you’d want to see on the wrong end of a torpedo.

With cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay, Gray creates vivid, gas lamp memories akin to his previous feature, the 1980-set childhood saga Armageddon Time, which explores the domino effects of modern American racism, adjacent to the Trump family’s specter. Unlike its predecessor, Paper Tiger doesn’t explicitly feature or mention New York’s most famous builders, but its story is set not long after the mafia established ties with the current U.S. President by purchasing property. The ghost of contemporary politics hovers over the plot, peeking in through the corners of the frame, as Irwin’s eyes grow bigger than his stomach. Under the impression that he can waltz into a Russian-controlled dockyard and offer advice, he even takes his sons on a midnight joyride to visit the building site set to make him rich, only for his paranoid clientele to threaten all three of them for witnessing something they shouldn’t have seen.

Things immediately escalate from there, as Irwin and the boys try to hide these mounting dangers from Hester, albeit to no avail. Before long, the brothers’ naïve get-rich-quick scheme blows up in their faces, yielding a tale of midnight break-ins, explicit threats, and Gary using connections of his own (as a former NYPD member) to retaliate, if only to keep his brother safe. But what neither man expects — and what the audience might not either — is the raw pessimism, and piercing fatalism, with which the tale unfolds. There’s just no way out. The deck was stacked against both men, dooming them from the start.

As the plot intensifies, so too does Gray’s aesthetic approach, as he captures scenes awash in hard shadows akin to classic horror, and films the brothers through obfuscations of glass and other glares. Their world becomes foggy with a quickness, causing both men to slowly unravel, as even their love for one another — and what they’re willing to do to protect each other — falls into doubt. Both Teller and Driver rest on a knife’s edge. They deliver incredibly measured performances that threaten to explode, as their characters wrestle between filial instincts and pure self-preservation, and the very idea of rising through the ranks in America reveals itself an illusory prospect. The more their mob friends close in on them, the more it seems like society at large no longer has a safety net.

If Paper Tiger has one major weakness, it’s Johnasson, albeit through little fault of her own. The movie’s naturalism, born of its personable, grounded interactions, is often interrupted by her performance, which takes after the more showy, melodramatic screen queens of Hollywood’s golden age — work that would feel more at home in, say, a Todd Haynes pastiche, though no one seems to have told her this. A pitfall of working within genre constraints is confronting their entrenched gender politics, and in attempting to elevate Johansson from the mere reactionary spouse found throughout mob films, Gray saddles her with a secondary subplot about her ailing health that seldom fits the rest of the story.

That said, the film carries such immense narrative momentum that even this nagging flaw can’t really bring it down. Each scene is crafted with tremendous dramatic gusto, whether moments of characters simply sitting down to chat — which is to say: to negotiate life and death — or of deviously conceived set pieces in unexpected locales, or even familiar ones used in unexpected ways. One scene turns a tall, open field into a claustrophobic maze; another uses shadows within the home to make comforting spaces feel sinister. It’s a film that dislodges one’s sense of self, never allowing its characters to find moments of peace, victory, or even reprieve in a genre otherwise obsessed with the Shakespearean rise and fall. By the end, you may as well ask if the pursuit of happiness is worth it at all, given what it costs; a fitting coda to Gray’s contemporary deconstruction of what the idea of America once meant, in the light of what it has come to mean, and what it demands of people’s souls.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.