The genre Echo Boomers most wants to be remembered alongside is not the slick heist picture. It is the social document — the film that captures something true about a generation by watching what that generation is willing to do to feel real. Seth Savoy’s crime film owes debts to early Sidney Lumet, less in its mechanics than in its instinct that a robbery story is most interesting when it is about the world that made it necessary.

Five post-graduate millennials — their degrees hanging useless against an economy they were promised and never received — begin breaking into Chicago’s wealthiest homes. The formal logic is simple: the system robbed them first. Echo Boomers has the intelligence not to argue with that premise and the honesty to watch what happens when the logic keeps running, past the point where it produces anything except damage.

Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Lance Zutterland, the accidental architect of the crew, with a constraint that serves the character well. Savoy seems less interested in making Lance likable than in making him comprehensible, which is the harder and more interesting task — and Schwarzenegger delivers it. The film’s real gravitational pull is Michael Shannon as Mel Donnelly, the fence who runs the operation from a stillness that classic Hollywood would have recognized immediately. Shannon plays this kind of character the way Robert Mitchum used to: without signaling, without indicating, just being the most dangerous person in the room by not needing to prove it.

The true story at the film’s root — a Chicago heist ring that operated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, run by young people who believed, with some justification, that they were owed — does something important for the film. It removes the option of fantasy. These are not the Ocean’s Eleven crew. The robberies are methodical. The aftermath is messier still. The film earns its grittier moments precisely because it refuses to turn them into set pieces.

Where Echo Boomers stops short is in the integration of its two ambitions. The social critique and the genre mechanics run in parallel more than they fuse — scenes of economic anger giving way to heist sequences that follow the form’s conventions with competence but without subversion. The result is a film that functions better than it transcends, which is not the harshest verdict in a genre crowded with films that attempt more and achieve less. At ninety-four minutes, it does not outstay the momentum it builds.

Echo Boomers is not a great film. It is an honest one — made with real craft in service of a story that understood its subject better than its protagonists did. The score it earns is the score its ambition deserves: solid enough to recommend, calibrated enough to trust.