Long before I had actually seen Azazel Jacobs’ second feature, The GoodTimesKid, I had heard tell of its final scene, in which the Gang of Four song “Damaged Goods” is played in its entirety. It takes a certain kind of confidence to use a Gang of Four song in a cinematic context. Deceptively simple post-punk loaded with weighty narrative, it’s virtually impossible to match this music with imagery without the filmmaker’s voice getting lost in the noise, without the soundtrack seemingly functioning as a mission statement above and beyond what the rest of the film has to say. Certainly, the thesis of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette seems most articulate in its opening scene, set to a lengthy excerpt of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” — the song serves as a key to unlocking that film’s visual indulgence, placing its evocation of angsty teen consumption and self-absorption within the irony of “problems of leisure” and the political context of the “body [as] good business.”

Jacobs makes the viewer wait about 70 minutes for the first use of “Damaged Goods,” but the song’s ethos still felt throughout the film. If there’s anything missed from Benten Films’ long-awaited release of The GoodTimesKid, it’s the full text of the letter, peeking out of the corner of the DVD box, that Jacobs wrote to the band asking for use of the song.

In Gang of Four songs, sex and commerce, personal relationships and socio-economic identity, are always inextricably linked, to the point where an apparent reference to one can be safely assumed to double for the other. It’s articulated best in another song, “Contract”: “Social dreams put in practice in the bedroom.” “Damaged Goods” swings back and forth: it’s a break-up song (“The change’ll do you good, I always knew it would/sometimes I’m thinking that I love you, but I know it’s only lust”) that dips into the language of transaction (“Damaged goods, send them back … open the till, give me the change you said would do me good/ refund the cost.”) It’s a fitting theme song for a film about three people desperate for change, bouncing back and forth between embracing the sentimentality of personal relationships and rejecting it. Never mind that it was shot on damaged short ends stolen from the set of Troy.

Sara Diaz, Jacobs’ longtime girlfriend and collaborator, speaks the film’s first lines: “Happy birthday, baby. C’mon baby, let’s start over.” Jacobs, playing birthday boy Rudolpho, is not amenable to either entreaty. A scruffy punk prone to provoking fist fights, he joins the army to escape Diaz’s domestic attention. His enlistment letter gets sent to another man with the same name (Gerardo Narajo, director of I’m Gonna Explode). The second Rudolpho goes to the enlistment center to sort out the mistake, but ends up following the first Rudolpho home, where Diaz is hoping to win back his affections with a birthday party. This drives the first Rudolpho running to a bar, leaving R2 to witness Diaz getting into her own fistfight, first with a birthday cake and then with a home appliance. The second Rudolpho joins in. She is his kind of girl.

They bond by sitting on the floor, drinking red wine straight from the bottle. She decides he’s even worse off than her, and does a dance — halfway between a jitterbug and the robot, in her in frilly dress and fithy converse — to cheer him up. She christens him “Depresso,” and is soon imploring him to help out around the house. “Depresso! Answer the door!”

The two Rudolphos are “damaged goods” in that their function in the world, in both the public and private economies, is undefined; they’re also literally damaged, each having been at the receiving end of dozens of blows over the course of the film. Though an asskicker in her own right, Diaz is the malleable center between them. Within hours of meeting “Depresso,” she’s dressed herself his clothes, remaking herself as his partner in crime, suggesting they run away together.  She’s more than happy to exchange her domestic partner for a new model, to get her fresh start via a simple transaction. Could it really be that simple?

The film follows 24 hours in the lives of these characters as they stumble around Los Angeles, tracing a breadcrumb trail between pockets of unexpected, often silent sweetness, and spats of impromptu violence. The city’s streets, buses, boats and diners photographed with a shabby romanticism that’s much less obtrusive than the excessively set-designed depictions seen in other recent LA-set quasi-romances. By the time that final scene rolls around, and Jacobs hands over authorial control to Gang of Four, the musical cue feels unusually well-earned. A film like 500 Days of Summer bends over backwards to convince you it takes place in a world where cultural totems of disaffection still mean something. The GoodTimesKid actually creates and takes place in such a world, without strain.