Directed by J. C. Chandor. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. Rated 14A.

The title refers to an exceptionally crime-ridden time in New York City history: 1981, with the setting mostly a rotting quarter of the Big Apple, where self-made man Abel Morales (Inside Llewyn Davis’s Oscar Isaac) runs his decidedly nonglamorous heating-oil business.

As a struggling immigrant and businessman, his current challenge is twofold: competitors are playing increasingly rough and he’s trying to pull off a tricky real-estate deal—in cash, with some tough local Hasidim, for a spot on the East River—that will finally put him ahead in the game. His bigger problem is that he wants to do everything legit, and this brings increasing disdain from his wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), daughter of an oil-company guy so famously crooked that an ambitious D.A. (Selma’s David Oyelowo, in a rather forgettable role) keeps an eye on the whole family.

With his sad-deer eyes and creamy, camel-hair coat, Abel has a demeanour and moral problems somewhat parallel to those of Michael Corleone. But where the Godfather movies took in a sweeping view of New World corruption through the eyes of first- and second-generation Italian-Americans, this Year tacks a much narrower path. Here, director J. C. Chandor (who created such complex worlds in Margin Call and All Is Lost) has Abel so heavily blinkered by moral qualms—he keeps resisting the urge toward violence that his competitors push upon him—that the character becomes duller as the story progresses.

The film’s dramatic doldrums are eventually interrupted by a car-and-foot chase that comes just when it’s needed, but then things settle back into their not-quite-Shakespearean conundrums. Everything is staged and shot with high seriousness, with the yellowish tinge that makes one think of the ’70s but also makes the movie play like American Hustle without the laughs. Chastain’s character often feels imported from another movie (perhaps that one, or The Sopranos), but Albert Brooks hits all the right notes as the lawyer who keeps getting Abel out of trouble that, in the end, just isn’t all that interesting.