Breaking bad?

A Most Violent Year is winning awards and nominations and getting favorable comparisons to The Godfather pictures and Martin Scorsese’s gangster films, and rightly so. But it’s not an easy thing to categorize in any audience-friendly way.

That title, for example, may seem to signal a shoot ’em up of some sort, but while there are indeed some gangsters and some guns in this movie, gunplay is pretty far down on its list of ingredients for action and drama. Moreover, it’s a long ways away from conventional cops-and-robbers tales.

Written and directed by J. C. Chandor, A Most Violent Year is film drama of an exceptional sort. It has outstanding performances in its two lead roles and in a half dozen supporting parts. The story has its mafia connections, but its main concerns are with people angling for business success in territory where the lines between good business practices and organized crime often are blurred.

An immigrant entrepreneur and former truck driver named Abel Morales (an excellent Oscar Isaac) and his wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain in full femme fatale mode), are trying to expand their New York City trucking business. Persons unknown and/or local rivals are hijacking their tankers, roughing up their drivers, and sabotaging their loan-heavy finances. A politically ambitious assistant district attorney (David Oyelowo, Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma) is coming after their business records.

Abel knows his way around (as does Anna, who is a mob boss’ daughter), but he is also intent on keeping guns and violence out of his work. His struggle to find the “most right” way of doing things while making a series of increasingly desperate choices becomes the central fascination in Chandor’s drama.