Henry Hill wanted to be a gangster the way other boys wanted to be astronauts, and for a long stretch the movie lets him have it. From a window across the street he watches Paulie Cicero’s crew run the cabstand and the neighborhood, and he decides — before he is old enough to drive — that these men have the better life. The narration is his from the first frame. What makes the film uncomfortable is that it mostly agrees with him.

The argument here is tonal, not moral. Martin Scorsese directed the picture from a screenplay he wrote with Nicholas Pileggi, who had spent years alongside the real Hill while reporting the book it is drawn from. That origin matters: this is a gangster story built by a crime reporter, and it plays less like opera than like a wiretap with a great record collection. The cruelty and the glamour share the same shot, and neither one cancels the other.

The most quoted sequence is also the thesis. Scorsese walks Henry and Karen off the street into the Copacabana through the kitchen, one unbroken Steadicam shot past every door that opens for a wiseguy, and by the time a table is carried out and set at the front of the room the seduction is complete — yours, not only Karen’s. Michael Ballhaus’s camera never stops moving and Thelma Schoonmaker’s cutting keeps freezing the frame at exactly the moments Henry would rather skip. The style is the morality. The film shows you the rush, then catches you enjoying it.

The voiceover does the work a conventional score would. Henry narrates, and then, without apology, Karen takes the story for a long stretch, and the handoff is what keeps the violence domestic instead of mythic. Lorraine Bracco’s Karen is no bystander; she is the second witness the film needs, the one who explains how a person ends up keeping the gun in the nightstand and calling it ordinary. Her account is funnier and more frightening than Henry’s, because she chose this with her eyes open.

Joe Pesci’s Tommy is the part the supercuts love — the “funny how” restaurant scene has outlived most of the films released that season — and it won him the Academy Award. But the menace belongs to Robert De Niro. His Jimmy Conway listens more than he speaks, and you can watch him doing the arithmetic on which friend now costs less dead than alive. Ray Liotta holds the center as the man telling the story, charming enough to pull you in and hollow enough that you begin to dread where he is taking you.

The songs are the other narrator. The Crystals, Cream, the Rolling Stones, Sid Vicious, and finally the piano coda of “Layla” laid over bodies turning up in trunks and meat lockers — every needle drop comments on the scene it follows rather than scoring a mood beneath it. Scorsese uses pop records the way other directors use voice-of-God orchestration, and it is why the film’s ugliest moments are also its most kinetic.

The last act trades the glamour for the comedown. The crew that looked untouchable spends its final months strung out and paranoid, watching the sky for helicopters, and Henry closes the story in witness protection in the suburbs, complaining that the spaghetti sauce out there is wrong. Scorsese never hands the audience a verdict on him. That refusal is the part the film is still arguing with itself about — the rush and the regret occupy the same frame, and which one wins depends on the sentence of Henry’s you happen to stop on.

The influence is easier to measure than the film. Every gangster picture made since has had to decide whether to answer it or ignore it, and “The Sopranos” — built partly from its cast and entirely from its disenchantment — is unthinkable without it. What keeps it alive is not the violence or the quotability but its honesty about pleasure: it knows exactly why the life is seductive and never pretends otherwise. That is the rarest thing a crime film can manage, and it is why GoodFellas remains the one the others are still measured against.