Interspersed with the intimate scenes are moments of rupture. Roy isn’t immune to consequence. There’s an exchange that ends badly at a crossroads where the wrong person is trusted; there’s a friendship that frays into a silence so complete it becomes its own language. Yet even loss is rendered with curiosity rather than melodrama. The chronicle resists easy moralizing: people in Roy’s orbit are complicated, as he is — generous and selfish in equal measures, capable of cruelty and rare tenderness. The narrative’s honesty is a kind of mercy.