Once, years ago, I accompanied a woman I was dating to her father’s house to feed his cat while he was out of town. The house was tucked away in an upstate backwater, one of those “census-designated places” that you can pass clean through before you’ve had time to take your foot off the gas. When we arrived, someone else was inside, already feeding the cat. I wasn’t surprised, given what I knew of my girlfriend, that her father had arranged for backup pet care. I was surprised, however, that the backup was Frank Serpico, the corruption-busting police officer portrayed by Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s 1973 film Serpico.

I recalled this encounter while watching Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman, a faux-’70s crime drama starring Rachel Brosnahan and Arinze Kene, now streaming on Amazon. It wasn’t just that much of the movie takes place at a rustic cabin where Brosnahan’s character, Jean, is hiding out from criminals and killers, as I’d imagined Mr. Serpico to be hiding out, informally, from old enemies. (Wrong: He was running, loud and proud, for a spot on the town board.) No, it was that this 21st-century take on ’70s grit seemed as harmless as 21st-century Serpico, in his seventies, scooping Friskies into a bowl.