Martin Scorsese’s small-time crime drama is funny, abrasive and frightening, with Harvey Keitel doing the worrying while Robert De Niro makes trouble. Its loose storytelling occasionally drags, but we recommend it for the performances and the unease.
Mean Streets is a funny, troubling crime film whose strongest scenes make looking after a friend seem like a full-time occupation. We recommend it, with a warning that its wandering story sometimes forgets to move. Martin Scorsese follows small-time hustlers in New York’s Little Italy, where Catholic guilt and unpaid debts complicate Charlie Cappa’s efforts to look after Johnny Boy. The screenplay, by Mardik Martin and Martin Scorsese, gives their daily encounters room to become awkward and repetitive. We soon understand why Charlie has difficulty walking away, even when staying is exhausting.
Harvey Keitel makes Charlie’s concern feel like a habit he cannot break. There is affection in the performance, but also the strain of a man who keeps volunteering for more worry, and we never quite settle on how much of this caretaking is for Johnny Boy’s benefit. The Catholic guilt matters because it makes an ordinary sensible decision – stop taking responsibility for this man – feel morally suspect. Harvey Keitel holds our attention through those doubts without making Charlie seem nobler than the people around him.
Robert De Niro is allowed to be much less reasonable. His Johnny Boy has a teasing, dangerous energy that makes each quarrel interesting even when the quarrel itself is petty. We laughed at their bickering, then felt anxious for Charlie, because Robert De Niro keeps making irresponsibility look entertaining enough to forgive. He also makes it hard to mistake that charm for kindness. The friendship works because Harvey Keitel keeps showing the effort involved in putting up with someone the audience can enjoy from a safe distance.
Kent L. Wakeford’s cinematography gives the neighbourhood a rough, immediate presence, with street scenes that feel caught in progress rather than tidied for inspection. The more feverish images suit men whose judgement is already unreliable; visual neatness would be the wrong choice here. David Nichols’s production design supports that sense of a small, enclosing neighbourhood, without the grand surroundings that might make crime look like a sensible career. The places matter because these people seem to belong in them, and because belonging does not make them comfortable.
The 1960s pop songs are essential to the film’s pleasure. They give the street life a lift without making the violence feel harmless, and their familiarity helps draw us towards people we might otherwise keep at a distance. Martin Scorsese and Sidney Levin’s editing keeps the rhythm unsettled as the music propels these everyday encounters. The roughness works because the quarrels can feel funny and dangerous almost together, without a solemn pause to tell us which response is correct.
The looseness also costs the film something. Some encounters repeat the same failures of judgement, and the later stretches occasionally slow when the accumulated worry ought to be enough to keep them moving. The screenplay could lose a little of that repetition without making these lives look any less aimless. At 112 minutes, the film is not long, but there are moments when the attention given to a quarrel exceeds what we learn from it.
As a gangster film, Mean Streets asks us to stay close to people with limited power and poor prospects. That small scale suits it: an unpaid debt or a friend’s bad judgement is enough to make the whole neighbourhood feel difficult to live in. Allow for the stretches that drift, and watch it for the uncomfortable business of liking someone Charlie would be wiser to avoid.
