Our Troubled Youth

It is a mark of Ramin Bahrani's integrity that his new film does more than transport you to an unexpected world, as movies often claim to do. Chop Shop specifies how it gets you there: by a hike along an elevated section of New York City highway and a ride on the subway's G line.

This attention to infrastructure is only fitting, given the setting to which you're delivered. Chop Shop was shot in the Willets Point section of Queens: the Iron Triangle, as it's called, where rows of auto body shops stand shoulder to shoulder along the almost-paved streets behind Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets. In August (when Chop Shop was filmed) the heat-struck road is choked with two solid lanes of cars inching their way into one- and two-story garages that stretch into the distance as far as the eye can see. So it seems, anyway, given the choice of lens that cinematographer Michael Simmonds sometimes makes for establishing shots, to compress the factual into the mind-boggling. But, again, it's a mark of integrity that the film doesn't often add such visual emphasis. It doesn't need to. Straight-on views of corrugated metal gates and flaking Dumpsters, pools of wastewater and heaps of tires, the highway bridge and elevated train and jet airliners roaring overhead give you something that's as essential to the movies as any flight of fantasy: the eloquence of the real.

By stages, along the highway bridge and through the subway tunnel, Chop Shop brings into the Iron Triangle a slightly fictionalized element: 12-year-old Ale (Alejandro Polanco), a spindly, T-shirted bundle of self-assurance who has received no schooling but figures he knows everything anyhow. Ale is sufficiently wised-up to scam a day-labor contractor into paying him to go away. He understands how to hawk candy bars successfully in the subway, without even a pretense of raising money for a charity. Most promising of all, he's figured out how to obtain a position with Rob, the owner of a body shop (played by Rob Sowulski, the owner of the garage where Chop Shop was filmed). In exchange for walking down the middle of the street to wave customers into Rob's shop--plus some work sanding and priming, repairing side-view mirrors, sweeping and locking up--Ale gets a cash salary and permission to live in an upstairs room. This housing is no more than a box of unfinished plywood, furnished with a platform bed, a microwave oven and a single window with a view onto the shop floor below. To Ale, though, it's the place where he can bring his 16-year-old sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), and make a home.

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