Heaven Knows What opens with the slow burn of a fuse leading to an explosion. In a public library, Harley (Arielle Holmes) tries to get the attention of her boyfriend Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), but he’s disinterested and rude. Harley has an ineffable allure, but she has none of the trappings of beauty, or the trappings of anything; she’s homeless, a heroin addict. She tells Ilya she’s going to kill herself, but he’s dismissive; he doesn’t believe or doesn’t care. Accompanied by a haunting electronic score, the tension rises as Harley steels herself to the task while she buys razorblades and she keeps repeating her intentions to anyone who will listen. Finally, Ilya tires of hearing her and confronts her – daring her to do it, bullying her to do it, saying if she loved him she would slit her wrists. And then she does.
Harley survives the attempt, but this opening scene stays with the viewer and sets the startling tone of the film. Directed by Josh and Ben Safdie, Heaven Knows What takes place in New York, but not the glossy and scrubbed world of wealth too often lazily-portrayed, but instead shows a view from below, from a subculture surviving off the scraps of the dominant society. Being New York though, these two worlds exist within inches of each other; underneath bridges in Central Park, or behind the bathroom door in a crowded Burger King, Harley and her friends are shooting up and carrying on a life that feels completely removed from the ordinary life of the city.
An outsider’s exploration of such a subculture could too easily veer into caricature, but the Safdie’s ace in the hole is Arielle Holmes, who is the general muse of the project as both the star and the author of the source material. Holmes is a recovering member of the NYC heroin underbelly and stole time in various Apple stores to write her experiences while they were still happening. The details wrought from her personal story, channeled through the technical expertise of the Safdie brothers, give the film both a hard-won authenticity and polish.
The loose story revolves around Arielle’s struggle to find some sanity and stability as she bounces back and forth between two men, Ilya and Mike. Ilya, chillingly portrayed by Caleb Landry Jones, is evil, dangerous, vampiric, but he also embodies the wasted romanticism of the junkie lifestyle and has a hold on Harley that she can’t shake free of. Mike is a dealer, a practical guy who sees his and Harley’s lives free of any illusions, but doesn’t understand that Harley might prefer the illusions.
A sense of fatigue sets in the last third of the film, as the characters remain circumscribed within the cycle of addiction, but it would be untrue to the characters to save them with any overly expedient narrative devices. The characters in Heaven Knows What live life moment to moment, and the film captures that sense of anything being possible at any time. The world the film portrays is a world many would rather avert their eyes from, but for those curious enough to look for the humanity in these characters, the immediacy of Heaven Knows What will not soon be forgotten.
