“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony Soprano once remarked around a table of champagne, lobster shells, Paulie Walnuts, and some one-night-only broads. Despite his seeming disdain for callbacks to the good ole days, Tony Soprano remained a man often ruled by nostalgia. His admiration for the Gary Cooper generation, the strong silent type who took their licks quietly, informed the impending storm of dread that drove him repeatedly to the therapist’s chair. Whatever the New Jersey mafia had become under his watch, it surely couldn’t measure up to the hay days of the shy guys of his father’s generation.

The marketing for The Many Saints of Newarks prayed on our collective sense of nostalgia, begging the question, “Who made Tony Soprano?” but the film from Sopranos showrunner David Chase, director Alan Taylor, and co-writer Lawrence Konner is decidedly less interested in telling the kind of origin story audiences have come to expect. But any true fan of The Sopranos knows that this is Chase’s bread and butter: denying his fandom their simple pleasures is as fundamental to his stripes as a storyteller as darkly funny violence and sour grapes melodrama. This is the same man who capped off his critically acclaimed series – the one that definitively launched the prestige television era as we know it – with an irreverent, cliffhanging cut to black that had audiences the world over checking to see if their cable just went out.

In many ways, the youthful Tony Soprano, as played by the late James Gandolfini’s actual son Michael Gandolfini, is but a shadow in the film. An observant sponge. Though some (many?) may be reeled in by the lure of a young Tony, he’s not the meat of this story. He’s barely even the gabagool. We’re not here to watch a once-promising son tilt towards darkness – robbing his first jamook or offing some out-of-line goomba – so much as witness the birth of Tony’s misplaced sense of nostalgia and stew in the weight of crushing legacy that is being born into a mafia family.

The dead speak, as they often have throughout The Sopranos, but in the opening scene of The Many Saints of Newarks they have been imbued the magical power of breaking the fourth wall. As Taylor’s camera drifts through a Jersey graveyard, picking up snippets of lost souls rambling their own little tragedies, we settle upon the final resting place of Christopher Moltesanti (Michael Imperioli) here to offer his own version of “Remember when?” directly to the audience. Narration by Christopher ghost is a bit of a hacky storytelling device, particularly as he recaps some major Sopranos series sticking points for the less devout in the audience, but perhaps is an excusable crime for a long-awaited coda to a series that ended before Obama was even elected.

Christopher sets the scene in the 1960’s, a time when the five families ruled relatively unchallenged. It was a golden age for the mafia and its made men with the DiMeo family boss Aldo “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti (Ray Liotta) running a tight and profitable operation. Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), Johnny Boy Soprano (Jon Bernthal), Junior Soprano (Corey Stoll) and Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.) run typical mob goonery but even before the cultural awakening – as witnessed here through the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement – shook up the relative steadiness of their operation, family drama ran high. Dickie becomes the focal point of this drama and we see the world through his eyes, coming to learn how Tony has molded himself after this favorite uncle.

Always someone short on genuine self-reflection with an unbalanced heaping of woe-is-me self-pity, Dickie is proto-Tony. The kind of guy who beats someone to death and then complain about getting blood on his new shoes. Crying out, “Why’s this always gotta happen to me?” While The Many Saints of Newark denies viewers the transformational maturity of Tony Soprano they may think they want, Chase and company treat us instead to the mold Tony has fitted himself to. The mold of Dickie Moltisanti, a wrathful egotist who believes himself to be the calm, cool, collected of the bunch. He is Tony Soprano and Tony is him, two sides of the very same coin.

It’s a fascinating way to tell a character’s origin story – by telling someone else’s story instead – but it works effectively here. In many ways, it makes the whole Tony becoming a boss affair seem deterministic in nature. You are who you are, and all that. The younger Gandolfini is great here, remarkably familiar in looks and attitude, as is the entirety of the cast. And even when The Many Saints of Newarks slips into its version of fan service – we’re offered glimpses of the younger versions of many legacy favorites with Billy Magnussen as Paulie, John Magaro as Silvio, Chase Vacnin as Jackie Aprile, Samson Moeakiola as Big Pussy, and Robert Vincent Montano as Artie Bucco – it is in service of this story’s legacy, even if it is fun to play point along in recognition a la Leonardo DiCaprio.

As The Many Saints of Newarks sets up a reckoning both within and outside of the family, a big portion of that divide coming from Harold’s racial awakening and his falling in line with more of the Malcolm X side of the Civil Right Movement but throughout the mob world, Chase reveals himself ever the troll. Sopranos fans should be used to abrupt conclusions and exercise caution here. It’s not a lights out moment blaring “Don’t stop…” but I could feel some throughout my screening deflate when Chase had revealed his final hand and the film cut to black.

But his has always been a story that shrugged off expectations and spat in the face of complaints. Despite numerous misreadings, The Sopranos wasn’t a show about badass mafia men. It was a journey of small, weak men posturing as strong. Petty men claiming their (undeserved) comeuppance. Brutal bloodshed that arrives at nothing. There never was a tidy bow to Tony’s story because it’s a story that started much before him and ended much after him. The Many Saints of Newarks is precisely that, underscoring the nihilism and dark hilarity of these Jersey mafiosos, reveling in their misplaced pride and mocking their small glory, lamenting the innocent many lost along the way. It’s proof that the Sopranos story can continue on – backwards, forward, sideways, wherever – without necessarily missing a beat. It’s good to be back amongst such insufferably petty goombas.

CONCLUSION: David Chase’s cinematic coda to the greatest television show ever made is a reminder of the greatness of ‘The Sopranos’, taking a look back through time at the taint of nostalgia and the crushing weight of legacy. The performances are aces across the board as Chase tells a tightly-wound but grand scale story of the banality of the Jersey mob criminality, one that closely mirrors the turbulent rise of Tony Soprano.