This atmospheric crime debut is a nod to ’50s pulp noir, a daring heist thriller and sensitive chronicle of the life on the margins of the postwar American dream.

Mild-mannered and terminally bored loner Richard works a dead-end job at Eddy & Dowd, a safe deposit company in small-town, postwar Riverton. Richard’s is a humdrum existence made marginally better when he realizes one day he can skim money from Eddy & Dowd’s accounts and even get away with it. When handsome, smooth-talking Marlon rolls into town, it’s love at first sight for both. Together they concoct a plan to rob the vault the company’s vault and make a run for it to the Big City, where freedom—hopefully—awaits. If they can make it.

But Richard and Marlon’s plan is complicated threefold: by Gloria, a recent divorcée and the apple of the town’s eye, who wants in on the plan; by Frank Todd, a disgraced cop desperate to restore his reputation; and by Mr. Dowd, the paranoid tycoon of Eddy & Dowd. As the lives of these characters’ fatally and explosively intersect, the stakes are raised and the prospect of freedom all the more urgent.