Heaven Knows What

The latest outing from acclaimed indie directors Josh and Benny Safdie is a harrowing blend of fiction and raw documentary that chronicles a young heroin addict feeding her addictions and finding mad love on the sidewalks of New York.

Based on the soon to be published memoir of Arielle Holmes — a homeless teenager with a ferocious Jersey accent — Holmes herself stars as Harley, a fictionalised version of her (former) real-life self; a heroin-hooked panhandler unable to get either the junk or her wicked boyfriend Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones, Antiviral) out of her system. Locked into a relentlessly repetitive cycle of addiction — the never-ending search to score, the squabbles with dealers and fellow junkies, the violence ever ready to erupt as either farce or tragedy — she is driven by a strange and self-destructive desire for beauty. Forever living in the present, she lives for the explosive moments of rapture that puncture the drabness of her existence – any sense of a future, a seemingly intangible thing.

Frenetic and dizzyingly intense from start to finish, it is the jaw-dropping, all-out performance by Holmes (a true talent-in-the-making - look out for her in Andrea Arnold's next feature American Honey) that gives this hard-hitting indie its visceral, electrifying edge. Encouraged to write about her addictions and experiences of being homeless after being befriended by director Josh Safrie following a chance meeting, the resulting film might be the most harrowing depiction of heroin addiction since Requiem for a Dream; albeit one evoking an emotional rawness and an independent spirit in its delivery that would make John Cassavetes proud.

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