A country locksmith has a lot of time to get into trouble, as El Bonaerense star Jorge Román discovers when a safecracking job goes bad. Bailed out of jail by a powerful uncle, Román quickly ends up on the rural outskirts of Buenos Aires in the hands of a shady bookie, who, in the first of many suggestions that law and order have relative values in Román's new home, hooks him up with a job as a policeman. Then Román finds out what trouble really means. Co-written, produced, and directed by Pablo Trapero–one of a bunch of interesting young directors from Argentina–El Bonaerense takes a fly-on-the wall approach to the story of Román's professional rise and personal fall. Shot through with a powerful sense of black humor, the film portrays police work as not only dishonest, but also impossibly chaotic. Román spends his early days on the job mostly hanging out, his paycheck arrives only because he has an "in" in the department, and his superior officer finds him useful mainly as a graft collector. Only a sweet relationship with a single-mom police instructor (Mimí Ardú) makes sense, but when Román joins the ranks of uniformed officers, she pessimistically (and accurately) senses that their affair will come to an end. El Bonaerense's only real problem is that it shares her fatalism. Román effectively plays his character as a cipher, but it's little mystery what will become of him. As a morality play, it's a one-sided contest, because the question of whether power corrupts is never a question at all. As a queasily thrilling tour of a dirty little corner of the world, however, Trapero's film offers a memorable ride.