“City of God” is a richly layered film that introduces its viewers to a group of young Brazilians who are given a single choice in life: rob or be robbed. The film effectively explores ideas about the loss of innocence, the brutality of man, a struggle for power, and the escape from madness.

The story is narrated by the moral Buscape (Alexandre Rodrigues), a boy from a housing project called Cicade de Deus (City of God) in Rio de Janeiro. He’s too timid to join the group of hoods that litter his neighborhood, but too smart to corner himself into the dead-ended jobs of the city. He grows up in the City of God alongside a boy who eventually overtakes the drug supply of the city by killing off his enemies.

Numerous critics have compared this film to “GoodFellas,” arguably the greatest crime drama of all time. I would not only agree to the similarity, but that “City of God,” unlike films that shadow the former, is most worthy of that comparison. Much like “GoodFellas,” “City of God” envelopes its characters around violence as they come of age.

I believe, however, that “City of God” holds a closer comparison to Robert Altman films such as “Nashville,” one of the greatest films to emerge from the 1970s, which weaves many characters into one story that indirectly connects them all.

Credit director Fernando Meirelles, who borrows, but doesn’t copy, the likes of Scorsese and Altman, and makes “City of God” work on this level much better than other films that commit cinematic larceny.

Younger-generation directors who make violent films with a highly stylized edge, such as Quentin Tarantino, copy Scorsese’s style all the time — films such as “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” are good examples. Both films try to create larger-than-life characters who speak through dialogue that just aches for its viewers to repeat, such as “Are you going to bark all day, little doggy, or are you going to bite?” from “Reservoir Dogs.”

Other directors, like Paul Thomas Anderson, copy the feel of Altman films, where characters overlap in interweaving storylines. The problem with Anderson’s pictures, such as “Magnolia,” is that he also tries to make his characters larger-than-life — “Magnolia” is about nine characters, all of whom but one are celebrities or relatives of each other. The narrative often gets lost in the path of the director’s ego, getting far too much in the way of the story he is trying to tell. Anderson seems to make films so that he can say, “Hey — look at this,” instead of creating an honest piece of work.

“City of God” ignores both concepts: The characters don’t speak in that snappy talk, nor are the characters of as grand of scale (numerous actors in the film had never acted before, many actually from the City of God). The film even mocks the stylistic dialogue female characters in the American mob movies gush over. The stupidity of the characters also provides genuine laughs throughout the movie.

The stupidity is the madness. “City of God” eventually takes a nasty path, where the violence that only sprinkles the first act of the film becomes the heavy emphasis of the story. Houses are shot at, characters are maliciously killed and children shoot children. The at-times inhumane “City of God” makes the satirical “Natural Born Killers” look like a Stanley Donen musical. But it’s that inhumanity that makes “City of God” an uncompromising and unflinching effort.

This film is a great one in that it makes a commitment to keeping its characters real — the numerous subplots that intersect with each other, shot in an addictive style (though wholly unoriginal), create the mood that makes both the violent and nonviolent sides of “City of God” wildly entertaining.

The film equally balances those hard-nosed feelings so well that I left the theater realizing that I laughed at some of the situations in which people were killed. And then I realized that was probably a bad thing. This is what sets it aside from those halfwits who attempt to make another Scorsese or Altman movie. The film realizes its own irony — a deeply rich one, it is — that the inhumanity is the humanity: Characters are stupid and pay for their actions.

“City of God,” though a sometimes very difficult movie to watch, is a film that cannot be missed. The film captures a cynical world where the problems are resolved with guns, and where the pull of a trigger determines your fate no matter how moral, young or intelligent the person holding the gun is.