“Most effective when its black humor, digital form and criminal absurdity work together.”

A pair of old Levi’s jeans can fetch a fortune in Japan. In Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Vintage Violence that is reason enough to set an entire criminal world in motion. When disgraced livestreamer Carter Tipe discovers rare denim in a Colorado mine, he sees a chance to turn his luck around. An invitation from Izumi, a Japanese woman he knows online, takes him to Tokyo, where the jeans promise money but the people waiting for him have their own plans. What follows is a crime caper mixing vintage fashion, online fame, romantic deception and yakuza violence.

Carter (Cole Sprouse) soon discovers that the jeans are only the beginning of his troubles. Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara) has her own reasons for bringing him to Japan, while her boyfriend Hiro (Nijiro Murakami) is caught in a web of debts and dangerous connections. The jeans also attract Edoga (Hio Miyazawa), a crime boss whose obsession with denim matches his appetite for power. With an exiled yakuza enforcer, Ko (Pierre Taki), adding to the chaos, a seemingly simple transaction spirals into betrayals and increasingly outrageous violence. The more the characters try to control the situation, the further it slips away from them.

The premise is ridiculous, but Kotlyarenko finds a comic logic in it. The jeans become objects of status, desire and fantasies of wealth, their value far exceeding their practical use. There is a curious connection between vintage clothing and digital culture: both rely on images, manufactured desire, and the promise that possessing something can transform you. The film never develops this into a sustained critique of capitalism, but it makes human desperation look especially absurd when lives are put at risk over a pair of trousers.

Kotlyarenko’s most distinctive choice is to let the film’s form reflect the fractured attention of the internet age. Livestreams, vertical phone footage, messages, video calls and split screens repeatedly interrupt the conventional cinematic image. Private encounters become performances, and the possibility of being watched follows the characters everywhere. This suits Carter, whose online life has blurred the line between experiencing something and presenting it to strangers. The formal play can be exhilarating, particularly when the sound design becomes part of the action, as in a chase involving Bluetooth earbuds. Yet the film’s appetite for stimulation is also its weakness. Nearly every scene introduces another interruption, joke, or escalation, leaving little room for moments to settle. In trying to reproduce online overstimulation, the film sometimes makes its audience feel the same exhaustion.

The Japanese setting brings further complications. Drawing on Japanese crime and exploitation cinema, including the grotesque humor and sudden violence associated with Takashi Miike, Kotlyarenko builds a world where criminal power is itself a performance. His villains are deliberately exaggerated, and violence often seems to demand an audience. However, Tokyo is filtered through a stylized outsider’s imagination. The film does not always distinguish between affectionate homage and a collection of familiar images of Japanese crime culture, leaving its cultural perspective less convincing than its formal experimentation.

Mizuhara gives Izumi an energy that keeps her from becoming merely a device for moving the plot forward. Her shifting loyalties place her at the center of the film’s competing interests, even as the chaos threatens to overwhelm her. Sprouse plays Carter with a mixture of vanity, naïveté and bewilderment. Their relationship hints at a more intimate film about the distance between online fantasy and actual human connection, but the relentless pace leaves that possibility only partly explored.

Vintage Violence is most effective when its black humor, digital form and criminal absurdity work together. At other times, it mistakes constant movement for momentum, piling one outrageous development on another without giving its characters enough space to register the consequences. Still, Kotlyarenko’s willingness to push digital filmmaking into an unruly crime picture gives the film a personality of its own.

The title promises violence, but the deeper subject is the desire that comes before it: the need to possess, to be seen, to become valuable in someone else’s eyes. Here, even old jeans can inspire near-religious devotion, and almost anything can become a spectacle. Everyone wants something from it. The question is what remains when the show is over.