J. C. Chandor’s new film, A Most Violent Year, follows Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), a blue-collar, outer-borough immigrant with an American dream. The year is 1981, one of the deadliest years in New York City’s history, and our hero struggles to protect his family business from the corruption and violence that has even managed to infiltrate the home heating oil industry. 

A cast of complex characters provides the intricacies for what is a simple plot. Abel is at the tail end of a five-year attempt to buy a Brooklyn oil terminus from a rabbi and, with a 40 per cent deposit down, he has just thirty days to provide the rest of the payment, or else the property goes to the competition. But danger looms and the business is threatened from every angle, from unknown hijackers stealing the company trucks to the District Attorney and his countless impending indictments. 

At times, Oscar Isaac’s Abel Morales seems to be just a good guy in a corrupt world. He certainly has the grit of a self-made man and the camelhair coat of a 1980s businessman, yet despite those dark features and brooding presence, he is no gangster. He is the anti-gangster. Chandor offers a morality play – about the aptly named Morales family – where the question of moral compromise eclipses the question of will they, won’t they succeed. 

Bradford Young’s cinematography complements the plot’s slow trajectory, offering still, grey-washed shots of the dirty, wintry Hudson River setting. The air is smutty, the industry is greasy, and polluted Brooklyn is filthy with graffiti, but Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain mesmerize in their beautifully tailored, spotless coats. Chastain gives another outstanding performance as the smart and hardened Brooklyn wife, Anna, who keeps the company’s books. Shots of Anna at a large desk, crunching numbers and armed with a large glass of red wine, imply not only her indispensability but also her power and authority. Abel is set on choosing the path that is ‘most right’, but Anna, herself a small-time gangster’s daughter, is the Lady Macbeth willing to get the job done. 

The couple’s most powerful scenes offer a prickling tension that compensates for the film’s lack of gratifying American Hustle-style con artistry. Chandor presents a very different type of hustle – or does he? A Most Violent Year seems to suggest that in a capitalist society, we are all just hustling, all just trying to choose not what is right, but what is ‘most right.’ 

The plot could have been more suspenseful and the script could have had a little more force, but the film’s subtlety is also its greatest strength. Chandor does his adult audience a favour, skipping the smash and crash action most Hollywood directors succumb to and instead opting to quietly report the ‘most violent’ crimes on the radio in the background. You may not get the pace and violence of Bond and Bourne, but if you appreciate intricate storytelling and a ferocious cast, you will not be disappointed. 

Director: J.C. Chandor; Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Alessandro Nivola, Albert Brooks. Cert 15, 125 mins. UK release date: 23 January 2015.