Potemkin Village

Standing on the corner of Avenue A and East Sixth Street, I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fakity-fake-FAKE. For Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of a wrong-man crime thriller, a Hollywood film crew transformed the façades of vape-juice shops and Bitcoin ATM–equipped bodegas to approximate the literal-dollar-slice-pizza and cyber-café storefronts of the late 1990s. They’d done a good job: I lingered there questioning whether the bagel pieces scattered a little too perfectly around an empty tree bed were edible or actually foam chunks painted by a prop technician. A sliver of brick wall coated in wheat-paste posters had me googling if Cheap Trick’s band members were still alive (some are) and what day Halloween was (Thursday) to confirm whether a party in Tompkins Square Park had indeed been scheduled for Saturday, October 31. (Clearly not.) I chatted up an older woman loitering nearby, hopeful for a colorful quote from a skeptical local resident, when she pointed to a busted, rusty Nissan and said, “That’s my car!” And yet: “I mean, not my car. I’m an extra.” …