This movie is billed as “A ‘Sopranos’ Story.” Set in 1967 and the early 1970s, it’s a prequel to the groundbreaking television series that has to serve the function of setting up the characters fans of that series know and, weirdly enough in a way, love. But it’s also got to stand on its own as a compelling narrative about family, loyalty, crime, all of the Italian-American gangsterism variety. And beyond that this movie reveals another ambition: to say something meaningful about race relations and Black crime relative to the explosions of urban violence that rocked the nation in the late 1960s, Newark being one of the places most rocked.

The movie opens with an evocative crane shot, that turns into a dolly shot, of a cemetery; the voices of the dead on a rainy afternoon crowd the soundtrack. One voice begins to take over: that of Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli, of the series, contributes his voice), who discusses his life and its end. “He choked me to death,” he says flatly about a key character from the series. This arguably teases the notion that here, you will find out why. At least if you don’t know the series. If you do know the series, you do know why. Or at least you know it takes place in a world where “whys” can be provisional, fleeting, flaky, in part because it’s a world of psychopaths, not to put too fine a point on it.

Is psychopathy hereditary? One can’t really say. One can say that both Dickie Moltisanti, Christopher’s father, and “Hollywood” Dick Moltisanti are guys with one if not more screws loose; brash, violent, impulsive men. “Hollywood” steps off a boat from Italy with a trophy wife maybe a third his age who catches younger Dickie’s eye, but one doesn’t make too much of it because one can’t really. Soon we’re getting a peek into a part of the family business, a numbers-running operation aided and abetted by some African-American hustlers, chief among them Leslie Odom, Jr.’s Harold. In a dispiriting early example of the all-caps EXPOSITIONAL dialogue, one character in an African-American home proclaims, “The numbers are the only way black folks got to get out of this sinkhole city.”

As the series “The Sopranos” evolved, growing in smarts and refinement even before its first season concluded, its expansiveness allowed for more and more authorial detachment and performance nuance. The viewer was afforded the opportunity to step back and really feel the humanity of characters that persisted beyond the awful actions those characters so frequently committed. One of my favorite “Sopranos” moments is at the end of the seventh episode, in which Tony makes ice cream sundaes for himself and A.J. Aside from being a virtuosic bit of acting from James Gandolfini, there’s a powerful sense of affinity and restfulness here that makes the viewer understand there are some laudable values that Tony has some connection to.

The high point of the film is the performances. Alessandro Nivola as Dickie carries the film with a wide range of conflicting emotions, as he is often torn between helping and hurting those closest to him. After he bashes his wife-beating father’s head into a steering wheel, he shakily says, “Pop,” like a young boy in disbelief at what he’s done. Later, in what might be a memory or a dream sequence, he coaches a blind youth baseball team and smiles wide at their victory. It’s one of the few moments of happiness for his character, who spends most of the film killing people close to him or watching them get killed. Michael Gandolfini similarly breathes new life into the character his father made famous. Not quite immersed in the mob lifestyle yet, young Tony spends his time running a gambling ring at his elementary school and robbing an ice cream truck. The film also explores young Tony’s relationship with his mother Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga), who fans remember as being the primary antagonist in the first season of “The Sopranos.” Farmiga steals every scene she’s in with her spot-on performance of the perpetually victimized mob wife. Her interactions with Gandolfini give viewers a window into the relationship Tony and his mother could’ve had, if mental health hadn’t been so stigmatized in the 1960s — and if their lives hadn’t been so brutal to begin with.

Another worthwhile aspect of the film is the conflict between Dickie and Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), a Black member of the DiMeo crime family who’s the target of racist jabs and belittling comments from the rest of the gang. After witnessing the Newark Riots in response to an incident of police brutality, McBrayer is inspired to launch his own gambling operation to rival Dickie’s. Hits are taken on both sides as a brutal gang war unfolds, leading to an intense shootout. “The Sopranos” has been criticized for presenting its few BIPOC characters in a stereotypical and one-dimensional light (see: “Christopher,” the infamously clumsy episode about Columbus Day.) Refreshingly, McBrayer in “The Many Saints of Newark” is one of the most well-developed and complex characters of the film. He has clear motivations and compelling emotional turns that stem from the criminal life he lives, as well as the fierce racial tensions of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Perhaps the strength of McBrayer’s character, like Dickie’s, comes from the fact that it does not rely on callbacks to the original series. His entire arc must be introduced and resolved within the film’s two-hour runtime. The same can be said of new character Giuseppina, Dickie’s unofficial-stepmom-turned-side-piece who dreams of opening a beauty parlor and has more of a say for herself than many of Tony’s girlfriends did in the series.

“The Sopranos” would often build up rivalries and gang wars, only to boil the conflict down to an unexpected act of violence triggered more by bruised egos than underworld politics. The friction between characters feels like it could go on forever, or like it could be brushed under the rug, lived with — and then somebody snaps. These were the moments that hooked me while watching “The Sopranos.” The same elements are present in “The Many Saints of Newark”.