One of the most important American movies of the last decade is leaving Netflix

Toward the end of his life, film critic Roger Ebert saved some of his most lavish praise for a young graduate of Columbia University who devoted his early career to making the kinds of movies not often promoted in the USA. Ramin Bahrani came straight out of the Ken Loach school of progressive storytelling, focusing on the lives and struggles of working-class people, the poor, and the displaced.

If you hurry, you can catch what may be Bahrani’s most crucial movie – 99 Homes – before it leaves Netflix at the end of April.

I don’t know if 99 Homes – released in 2014, a year after Ebert’s death – is Bahrani’s best movie. His three-picture run between 2005 and 2008, which included Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and Goodbye Solo, is as good an early trio as you will find from an American director in the 21st century.

The first two are vibrant studies of the working poor in New York City, while the third is a loose adaptation of the classic Iranian film Taste of Cherry.

Catch this important film before it leaves Netflix at the end of April

For my money, Chop Shop is the best of that early run. It plays as a filmic version of the Steve Earle song “City of Immigrants,” a hard-worn story about a boy who must make his way in a big city. Despite its grim premise, it is jammed with more life, energy, and humor than you will find in most nominal comedies.

But 99 Homes did something that Bahrani’s other movies did not. 99 Homes shifted its attention away from the immigrant communities that had been the focus of his earlier movies. 99 Homes showed how economic crisis doesn’t see color or race or ethnic origin. 99 Homes was about the tragedy that befalls working-class white America when forces of greed are left unchecked.

The rapidly rising star Andrew Garfield, fresh on the heels of his turn as Peter Parker in a couple of Amazing Spider-Man movies, plays Dennis Nash, an unassuming young father who is trying to raise his son and support his mother. Nash is a construction worker, and this is in the wake of the housing bubble crash of 2008/09. Work has dried up.

The first thing 99 Homes establishes is how close so many regular working-class Americans are to economic catastrophe in the event of crisis.

As if that weren’t scary enough, the next thing the story does is demonstrate in agonizing detail the inhumane lengths those same hard-working people will be driven to overcome that catastrophe.

This isn’t the stuff of a ghoulish nightmare. There’s no murder-for-hire or organ trafficking. Nash and the people he comes to know don’t enter the world of pornography or drug-dealing. What we see is much scarier, both more mundane and more compelling than those lascivious pursuits.

Nash meets up with a ruthless real estate “agent” named Rick, who makes a great living off the misfortune of others. He evicts families from their homes, patches them up cheap, and flips them fast. After suffering the shame of being evicted himself, Dennis puts his construction experience to work for Rick. But that type of work only goes so far.

With a family to support, Dennis soon finds that the real money comes from turning into another Rick himself. He takes over the role of evicting families, learning many unsavory, illegal tricks to force them into ruin for his profit.

If this sounds like difficult material, it is. Bahrani doesn’t shy away from the ugliest elements of his narrative. But like his earlier films, 99 Homes is brimming with life and humor. Garfield is excellent in his everyman role, and the movie is greatly enhanced by several outstanding performers in supporting roles.

Laura Dern plays Dennis’ mother, Lynn, with her typical blend of toughness and humor. And as Dennis’ Svengali/mentor, Rick, Michael Shannon creates one of the most riveting monsters in recent American film. Shannon, among the finest American actors of his generation, is charming and repulsive in equal measure.

He is a genuine low-rent Mephistopheles, offering the promise of the good life if you are just willing to give up all sense of decency and humanity.

99 Homes scooped up a handful of awards ten years ago, mainly for Shannon’s supporting turn. It should have had a much bigger impact, but American film remains so obsessed with superheroes defending the world against super villains that it rarely takes a look at the actual villains who go to work every day to profit at the expense of the less fortunate.

What made 99 Homes so important was that it demonstrated very persuasively that the white working poor and the immigrants who typically populate this kind of story have a tremendous amount in common.

There have certainly been movies in the past decade that have picked up on this idea – movies like Elizabeth Wood’s White Girl and John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal. But it is still an underrepresented genre in modern American film, and 99 Homes remains one of its most potent examples.

Catch it on Netflix before it disappears at the end of April.

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