July 2025 Bonus: One Year In A Life Of Crime
the true crime that's worth your time
The first installment in what became a three-part, multi-decade project.
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The crime
The crime/s in the title include drug possession, theft, and administrative law-breaking like bail-jumping, resisting arrest, and so on.
Viewers also see intimate-partner violence, and borderline endangerment of children and pets. For that and the preparation of intravenous drugs, I'll drop a content warning here.
The story
I said when I reviewed what's probably America Undercover's most memorable outing, the so-called "Iceman Tapes," that I'd try to track down the whole list. I still intend to do that, but I came across the first chapter in what became the "One Year" troika quite by accident, looking for a Watergate doc on HBO Max and getting recommended "One Year In A Life Of Crime" instead.
No regrets, either. Well, maybe that I didn't have time to screen the other two portions of Jon Alpert's grimily verité 1989 look into the interconnected lives of Rob, Fred, and Mike, three "petty criminals" in Newark, NJ. But the first one, like "Iceman," has a "high-fiber, stripped-down approach to documentary filmmaking," one that compared with today's glossy and predictably modular Netflix three-parters is…well, a breath of fresh air isn't quite the right way to say it, because there's stale Newport smoke curling off of nearly every frame. It's well worth your time, though, and not just because it wouldn't get made, or made this way, today.
Today, your subjects would have more true-crime-doc savvy; they'd probably feel more rehearsed, more familiar on an unconscious level with the rhythms of the prestige documentary. They'll know better than to put hands on their girlfriends with a camera rolling, even a short fuse like Mike when he's five beers in. (Certainly the girlfriend's teary announcement, facedown on a bed with a couple of felines who could also do better, that she's getting an abortion because Mike's never going to change would get more careful treatment.)
And the world around your subjects has different ideas about your subjects: about substance misuse; about whether juvenile incarceration can create any positive outcomes, or only vicious cycles; about whether Mike's unexamined defiance is toxic masculinity, or a legitimate point of view on law enforcement that only ever treats him as a problem to confine, or a product of generational abuse and trauma (some of it, I would posit, of the traumatic-brain variety, but I am not a doctor!) – or a cocktail of all three, plus poverty, whose recipe nobody in authority seems interested in adjusting.
Mike himself doesn't seem that interested in analyzing it, but it's not because Alpert isn't asking the questions – those, and others, constantly, fearlessly. He asks Rob's father why he destroyed Rob's favorite stuffed bunny. He asks Fred, after Fred has asserted that he's able to do just one speedball and not "catch a habit," why he doesn't just not do any, then. (The "two hours later" that ushers us into Fred's second or third needle of the day is the "it's that or break down sobbing"-est chyron I've seen in a while.) He asks each and all of the men if it's easy to steal, if they get scared, how much they'll get for what they boost, how come they didn't hold out for as much as they said, how they think it'll go if they skip court dates.
I don't think it's possible for Alpert, or anyone else, to make a doc like this today, to find subjects without cultural self-consciousness – but a big part of why this one could succeed even in a more naive televisual age is Alpert's genuine and unjudgmental interest in these men, in their "work process" and their thought processes.
Could Alpert push harder on the idea that these lives, lived on street corners and under aliases and millimeters from catastrophe, are products of institutions and administrations that don't care about poor people? In theory, sure, but that's a different documentary; it's also a different documentary if any of the men is Black (and I'd like to hear the production's thought process vis-a-vis casting, given Newark's demographics then – did people of color mostly refuse to talk to filmmakers? was it "cast" off court dockets or as the stub of a diversion program?).
This isn't a complaint; it's a credit to "One Year" as it exists that I'm asking those questions. And as it exists, it's a painfully evocative portrait of three people – and the people who try to love them – at the mercy of capitalism and the carceral state. That isn't to say that they aren't responsible for their actions, but rather that they're only ever responsible, versus in control of their destinies; only ever hungry, and to blame.
You can watch "One Year," and the 1998 and 2021 updates, on HBO Max – and if you liked America Undercover's other investigations, or the Up series from Michael Apted, I think you should. - SDB
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