Tiller Russell’s documentary tells a gripping story of New York City police corruption in the grisly 1980s, when the city’s reputation for crime and disorder was at its very worst. This film has the heft of something like Scorsese’s Goodfellas or Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, and its star witness sounds eerily like Joe Pesci in full flow. This is the crooked and not especially repentant cop Mike Dowd; Russell focuses on Dowd’s relationship with his cop partner Kenny Eurell.
In a culture where cops were expected to cover up for each other, Dowd and Eurell pursued an ambitious career of corruption: taking bribes from Dominican druglords, acting as their highly paid bodyguards, burgling other druglords’ apartments and co-managing the drug business with the bad guys – while naturally becoming more paranoid and crazed by ingesting the cocaine. There’s a fascinating scene in which Dowd – whose self-pitying and sentimental sense of his own cop identity never entirely leaves him – almost breaks down in tears recounting the death of another officer, shot by villains. But he never quite admits or realises his own effective complicity. It’s an absorbing study of group dysfunction.
