Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ties together two seemingly unrelated incidents in a web that, netting a number of side players, draws tight around a particular family. The film adroitly switches chronology back and forth through unnecessary printed titles dated around a botched robbery, though at his New York Film Festival press conference, director Sidney Lumet spoke of the unsolicited manuscript that arrived in the mail as achieving its fewer time shifts without any extra-textual indications of their occurrence.

Spry at eighty-three and with a mischievous gleam, Lumet claimed sincerely still not to know whether first-time New Jersey screenwriter Kelly Masterson was a man or a woman (he’s the former) but spoke  of changes he had made in the original treatment. To make things more believably intense and “the stakes bigger,” he got the story’s original two bar buddies changed to brothers; then, to avoid having that level of intensity seem faked, he sought the “most marvelous actors,” though for a time it remained unsettled as to which of the leads, Philiip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, would play the pushy elder sibling, which the younger. (Watching these two actors strut their stuff, one wonders how there could have been any doubt.)

An IRS audit looming, overextended broker Andy (Hoffman) is sorely pressured, having siphoned off considerable sums to support a lifestyle beyond his flaunted means, plus more for the fancy, fey, high-end dealer who supplies and injects his drugs. Though he does not prick up ears when his father Charles (Albert Finney) later utters a bitter line about burning the place down (and, presumably, collecting on insurance), he proposes a bloodless robbery to Hank (Hawke), at first hiding the fact that the intended target is their parents’ shop, whose insurance policy will result in a theoretically victimless crime.

A quarter behind in child support and badgered by his spiteful ex, Hank, too, sees himself in a bind. Not successful at whatever he does, his camel’s back is broken by the worst line in the movie: his adored daughter’s throwing “loser” in his face when he fails to come up with promised funds for a school field trip. A thornier moral problem, though not bothersome to him, is his longstanding Thursday sex trysts with his big brother’s wife Gina (Marissa Tomei), whom he professes to love and want to marry.

Bullied against the wall, cajoled and baited by a two-thousand-dollar cash advance, Hank caves in but, terrified, enlists barman Bobby Lasorda (Brian F. O’Byrne) into physically entering the jewelry shop while he waits outside in silly disguise. Not just a hackneyed phrase in this case, as fate would have it, usual clerk Doris has to baby-sit that morning, and the feisty woman dropped off by father Charles on his way to a DMV test is Hank’s mother Nanette (Rosemary Harris).

It is no “spoiler” to mention Hank’s bedding Gina or the gravity of Nanette’s wounds, both openly revealed early. Rather, back-and-forth on the calendar, sometimes with short repetitions from the slightest different angle, the story captures events spinning beyond control. The feckless younger brother is blackmailed by dead Bobby’s girlfriend’s (Aleksa Palladino, as Chris) strong-arm brother Dex (Michael Shannon) and close to falling totally apart when an innocent car-rental manager proves elusive.

But if Hank is not admirable, it is the childhood-scarred Andy who is a monster, losing whatever small soul he possesses in bloody thrashing to extricate himself. And, driven by grief, dismissing both sons and police as useless and ignoring his self-righteous Christian daughter, Charles prowls in his oversized sedan as an obsessive-compulsive dispenser of justice, a danger to everyone.

Lumet asserts that in “good drama” -- here meaning “tragedy” but not including so-called “she-tragedy” -- action arises from character. On the other hand, In misunderstood, often-maligned melodrama, the protagonists are seldom strong or “heroic” types but, rather, even unsympathetic personalities forced to react continually to externals beyond pseudo-rational predictability. Circumstances spiral downwards, whirling victims into the vortex, and it is the task of director and actors to make such events believable. With a turn or so too many of the screw, cast and crew do just that in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

(Released by ThinkFilm and rated “R” for a scene of strong, graphic sexuality, nudity, violence, drug use and language.)