Sidney Lumet’s latest film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, is a fascinating cross-pollination of the classical and the experimental. It toys around with chronology but does so in order to bring more structure and attention to classical character motivations. The story takes the shape of a modern crime melodrama but transcends its characters into the realms of a Greek tragedy.

I hesitate to reveal too much about the film and it is certainly difficult to try to write about it without doing so. That is because the story’s twists and permutations are not based on criminal clockwork but on the relationships and feelings of the people involved. So I would suggest you shelve this review until after, although I will try to preserve the most crucial points if you continue.

The movie tells the story of two brothers, Andy (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke), who both lead meager lives of desperation. Andy, the older one, hates his job as a real estate agent and feeds on a drug habit that eats his money away. Hank can’t afford to pay alimony to his ex-wife, Martha (Amy Ryan) or even his daughter’s school field trip to the musical, The Lion King.

Andy, the more calculating and cunning one, comes up with a plan to execute a robbery of a jewelry store and tries to persuade Hank to do it, explaining it will be a monetary solution to their problems. Hank, the younger, needier one, is less than confident that he can pull it off. But Andy assures him that they will use no guns and that the store itself will be well-covered by insurance. Of course, the seemingly airtight plan does not precisely translate into action and everything goes badly wrong.

In most movies, that botched robbery alone would serve as the climax but Lumet’s film actually begins with it and then rewinds and sifts through different viewpoints to show what led each character to think the way they did. The innovative screenplay by first-time writer Kelly Masterson splits into prolonged, isolated segments that separately follow the dreary lives of all characters in the timeline surrounding the pivotal event. Then the film gradually fast-forwards in these segments to show each character’s immediate drastic response to the crime. This strategy spares us from having to keep a scorecard of events (like last year’s Babel, which spun out too many disjointed stories to care about) and allows us to intently examine the personalities and intrigue behind each person, one at a time.