In a moment of willful confusion, Jacques Audiard’s latest film begins with a viciousness that could perhaps give the wrong impression. Three men enter a dingy apartment building carrying a sack, and open it to let loose a flurry of rats, before entering an apartment and roughing up its inhabitants. Who are these tough guys? Some may be aware that The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a remake of James Toback’s minor classic Fingers, in which Harvey Keitel stars as a man torn between the piano and the Mafia, and assume that similar underworld shenanigans are at play here. They would be only partially right, as Tom (Romain Duris) is a real-estate mogul in training, working under the steady tutelage of his father (Niels Arestrup) to make a buck by any means necessary, including shady ones. Tom is an angry, confused man-child, one moment a hard-nosed wheeler-dealer, the next petulantly baiting his father’s latest conquest (Emmanuelle Devos). It is only a chance encounter with Mr. Fox, a musical impresario, that reminds Tom of the internal debate that has been percolating unnoticed inside him between his father’s grinding thuggishness, and a half-remembered dream of his mother’s musical life. Fox offers him an audition, on the basis of his teenage proficiency, and suddenly his entire life is called into question.

The rest of Beat consists of watching Tom’s two worlds slowly but irrevocably head toward collision. He takes piano lessons with Miao-Lin (Linh Dan Pham), a Chinese music student who speaks no French, prepping for his audition while also conducting his scurrilous daily business. Tom is twentysomething angst and confusion come to raging life, a ball of contradictions whose lack of direction causes him to lash out in surprising ways. Repeatedly threatening his father that he refuses to execute his dirty work, wanting to punish him for his mother’s untimely death, he still comes to his aid again and again, almost killing a recalcitrant restaurant owner who threatens his father, and attempting to approach a Russian gangster who owes him money. Music, though, pulls him away, reminding Tom of what has been missing from his life. In interviews, Audiard has described his desire to craft “a modest picture,” and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a well-crafted entertainment that harks back to the pre-New Wave French cinema of Marcel Carné and Julien Duvivier. Its characters are the focal point, and they simply exist rather than illustrating some projected social viewpoint. In their confusion, we recognize our own lives, and their similar lack of a straight-arrow Hollywood narrative.

Audiard enjoys keeping us on our toes, never providing an opinion about his characters’ actions. How nefarious is the work that his father has Tom do? Is Tom any good as a pianist? Does he have any chance of succeeding at his audition? We never know, and part of Beat’s impressive storytelling efficiency is its rigorous desire to leave things unsaid. Beat closes with a coda that takes place two years after the events of the film and finds Tom in a world very different from the one he had started in. Has Tom changed for the better? Has the sickening violence of his past been put away for good? Audiard allows us to make up our own minds about these questions, and many others. The Beat That My Heart Skipped makes nothing easy for us, refuses to simplify a thing—and ultimately, that is its gift to us.