Heaven Knows What

Harley loves Ilya. He gives her life purpose and sets her passion ablaze. So, when he asks her to prove her love by slitting her wrists, she obliges with only mild hesitation, perhaps because of her other all-consuming love: heroin. The latest from acclaimed sibling directors Josh and Benny Safdie (Daddy Longlegs) blends fiction, formalism and raw documentary as it follows a young heroin addict who finds mad love in the streets of New York. The Safdie brothers’ fictional adaptation of the memoirs of Arielle Holmes, a homeless heroin addict at 19, who is also the protagonist of the film. Harley is the name of her alter ego, incapable of freeing herself from her addiction to the drug or from a destructive relationship. Her days go by like that, in grey streets and narrow New York apartments, between the frenzy of the search for a fix to ease all her troubles, and the episodes of a stormy relationship that makes them worse.