Mean Streets

Mean Streets (1973) was the first major project that Martin Scorsese both wrote and directed for widespread distribution. As with his student films, he tried to recreate the familiar sights, sounds and colourful personalities of New York’s Little Italy, the neighbourhood Scorsese grew up in. It’s a film full of the youthful exuberance of a young director given a chance to prove himself, and while it lacks the polished, neat storytelling of later films such as Gangs of New York, it is also much easier to believe in, much smaller in scale and as a result, far more likeable.

Admittedly, I came to Mean Streets thinking it would be a gangster movie, in the vein of Scorsese’s most enduring 90s films such as Goodfellas and Casino, all top mafia gansters dodging bullets and trying to move up in the company – involving and often shocking motion pictures, but focusing on characters who need to exaggerate themselves in order to survive. I was surprised to find that at the heart of Mean Streets is its flawed and very human characters, and as a result, this very early Scorsese film seems mature and intimate in a way latter films like The Departed have entirely lacked.

The plot in Mean Streets is loose. It centres on the relationship between Charlie and his loose-canon friend Johnny Boy (played by Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, respectively, who would become Scorsese stalwarts, and it was the success of this film that really launched all three men’s impressive careers). Charlie’s uncle is high up in the local mafia, and Charlie does some low-key work for him. His close friend Johnny Boy, meanwhile, has run up big gambling debts and his abrasive personality is getting him a lot of enemies. Johnny is always asking Charlie to put a good word in for him, but Charlie knows that Johnny just isn’t cut out for it, and refuses – but leaves himself vulnerable when he gets romantically involved with Johnny’s cousin.

Charlie is the heart of the film, the identifiable everyman, but it’s Johnny who drives the plot forward, and this is one of Robert De Niro’s best performances – and that’s saying a lot for an actor of his calibre. It’s refreshing to see him playing a truly unappealing character. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull are deeply flawed, but they’re self-aware, they know they’re doing terrible things and regret the mistakes they make, and are heroic in a melancholy sort of way, but Johnny Boy is just irredeemable, because not only does he never show any sincere remorse, it never even occurs to him that he ought to be contrite – he’s just so egocentric and clueless about the world around him that he blunders through it thinking he’s doing the right thing. It’s brave for an actor to take on a role like this, and De Niro does it with astonishing believability.

What really makes Mean Streets stand out is that its stakes are ostensibly small; it’s not about Godfathers or men who are at the top of their game. It’s about the losers, the pariahs, the boys who haven’t quite grown up yet who’re struggling to become adults. In one of the best moments of the film, the two men just start fighting like kids with metal dustbin lids, not caring if they wake the neighbourhood, absorbed in their childish game and the bond it makes between them – and then Johnny Boy of course later takes everything too far, thinking it’s entertaining to shoot his gun in the air, even at the neighbours he dislikes. It’s the contrast between moments where the real strength of the friendships comes out, contrasted with the unreasonable things Johnny does that make Charlie’s situation so believable, and the skeleton of the film so strong, even if its flesh is mostly little more than random encounters, quarrels and conversations in daily life.

Also worthy of mention is the humour. This is a very funny film, as a result of its arbitrary structure, its sketch-like construction. A lot of the things that happen to the major characters are absurd or incongruous, from unwise business decisions from the small-time gangsters to a superbly jarring scene where these wisecracking, masculine gangsters are stuck in a car with an excessively flamboyant, posturing homosexual. It’s a clever movie, unafraid to make its audience uncomfortable, unafraid to take risks, and content just to tell the story of nobodies, and what happens to them when they stick their necks out that little bit too far, and that’s what makes this an excellent film.