Actor-turned-film-maker John Slattery – the silver-fox ad director Roger Sterling from TV's Mad Men – makes a very accomplished directorial debut with a film featuring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final performances. It is a violent, deadpan seriocomic drama of wiseguys and stupid guys all up in each other's business; the story, tangled and clotted with its own loose ends, is set in a small east-coast town called God's Pocket in the early 80s, which Slattery represents with a subdued visual palette of chocolate browns, yellows and ochres.

John Turturro and Hoffman play Bird and Mickey, a couple of guys on the fringes of the mob working in meat-packing; Mickey is married to the improbably gorgeous Jeanie, played by Christina Hendricks, whose obnoxious grownup son Leon (Caleb Landry Jones) from an earlier relationship dies in a mysterious workplace incident. It is a catastrophe that up-ends everyone's lives, further complicated when a has-been alcoholic newspaper columnist called Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) gets involved. Slattery's direction is controlled, downbeat: very different to Lee Daniels's florid and uproarious (but inspired) response to another Pete Dexter novel, The Paperboy, with its similar themes. The action shunts from melodramatic to bizarre to sentimental, with trace memories of The Sopranos, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Yet it makes a very plausible whole, and Hoffman is great.