In the opening minutes of Jon Alpert’s real-time biographical documentary, Jon stays with two men who are preparing a burglary in broad daylight on a main street in Newark, New Jersey. The tools are unloaded, the car prepared for a fast getaway, and smiles and jokes bounce between the two soon-to-be thieves. When asked what would happen if they got caught, they laugh and reply, “We go to jail.”

Jail is one of many constant homing points in LIFE OF CRIME 1984–2020, which follows three subjects—Rob, Freddie, and Deliris—trapped in cycles of poverty and addiction, turning to crime to survive on the margins of American society. The film is the third in a series but also the culmination and combination of all the work that came before, going from Alpert’s earliest footage to the last shoot at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

LIFE OF CRIME 1984–2020 is far from an easy watch. Drug use is shown in uncensored detail, and violence at home and during robberies (largely burglaries gone awry) is very much present if often just out of the frame. Most of the crimes unrelated to drug use (well, everything is related to obtaining and using drugs in a cycle of poverty and addiction that the United States still insists on criminalising) are overt, as easy as walking into a store and walking right out again arms loaded.

The greatest achievement of LIFE OF CRIME 1984-2020 is the lack of judgement, moralising, or charity throughout. Alpert’s camera remains a neutral witness, as candid as its loquacious, vivacious subjects are in moments of good humour and brutality. It is a picture of life slipping through the cracks and a country that, in the six presidents from Reagan to Trump, does little to aid the economically precarious and addicted but does much to punish. The War on Drugs is in full swing, especially in the documentary’s early scenes with its condescendingly chipper jail wardens. Perhaps the documentary’s largest oversight is its lack of insight into the racialised treatment of petty thieves and addicts – Rob is white, Freddie and Deliris are Hispanic, and their neighbours are often Black—prompting officers to warn Rob to get back to “his” neighbourhood. But the personal lens on the trio, for better or worse, takes precedence.

Alpert’s camera is far from neutral: attachment to his subjects and their cycles of improvement and relapse is tangible throughout. The documentary abruptly ends in 2020, with Deliris’ passing after a lockdown-exacerbated relapse. While Rob and Freddie both succumbed to their addictions prior to 1998 (the end of the second documentary project), Deliris’ death and the pandemic-altered landscape that heralded it feels like the final nail. The masked wake is one of the film’s more subdued scenes but still pulsing with vibrancy in the face of uncertainty. The American dream lives on in opportunity but dies in the harsher, colder reality so relentlessly captured here.