This is a true story.
This is a portrait of the underworld in that era, not a caricatured gangster legend. It is about the struggle and survival skills of the lowest rungs of society during a period of dramatic social upheaval, a vivid, living network of capillaries overlooked by the dominant narratives of a great age.
It is evil as primal as Alex's in A Clockwork Orange: no philosophical introspection, only animal nature nourished by hollow glory.
This is not a feel-good story of flashy fights. It is a brutally cold record of survival, meant to show rather than tell, and to reveal the arc of human nature.
