With an art degree yet little artistic inspiration, James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) spends his days in the art museums, not exactly appreciating the works but plotting how to pilfer them away.  He organizes a heist of some Arthur Dove paintings, employing two neighborhood cons, Guy Hickey (Eli Felb) and Ronnie Gibson (Javion Allen), but when things go awry, J.B. must go on the run until things settle down back home in idyllic Framingham, MA, still recovering from the shock of the crime against their museum. 

Kelly Reichardt writes and directs The Mastermind, a 1970s-set comic caper distributed by Mubi.  The 110-minute film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival ahead of a lauded festival run culminating in a limited sub-200 screen theatrical release, which led into its mid-December bow on streaming.  It is a film that is fiercely Reichardt, but to try and define that further, the closest one can get is if you take a Coen Brothers’ odd-ball and place them in a Scorsese conman’s fall from grace, but run it three, four, or five times slower with stakes three, four, or five times less major, yet treated with the same severity that any of Scorsese’s crime bosses treat their empire, and trading in their expensive suits for a cozy New England cable knit sweater lovingly pulled by costume designer Amy Roth. 

While J.B. has little control over his own life, Reichardt places total control over her narrative on O’Connor’s shoulders, who is able to play this hapless man with incredible accuracy.  Stripped of the charm of the film, J.B. is an incredibly unlikable character, not just in that the moral compass of the audience will point us away from him, but even in the context of the film, he is shown to be someone that people associate with, but seldom do they build a true relationship with.  Even at home with Terri (Alana Haim), his wife, or later with Fred (John Magaro) and his wife, Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), it is not just us that find him to be a mildly repugnant presence.  Beyond that, though, the cast all seem slightly lost without enough guidance on the page, and while O’Connor benefits from being the sun upon which the other characters revolve in this narrative, even he finds himself returning to the well only to find it has run dry, and his performance begins to wither.  It is not so repetitive, though, to be called one note because O’Connor finds a way to soften J.B.’s abrasiveness in the moment so that his egotism is apparent only when we squint our eyes towards him as his mild enough antics finally begin to agitate us.  We are lulled into his muted charisma, but it is not until after the fact that we realize he thinks he is better than us.   

The irony, then, is that he is an utter failure in all aspects of his life, but Reichardt has such a well-balanced script that we do not immediately realize that, either.  It is through the agitated phone calls with his wife or the exasperated looks his mother (Hope Davis) shoots him when he asks for a loan that we realize this is a man who has fallen into the cushy, white picket fence, American dream, and is totally dissatisfied with it because he feels he is above it all – deserving something more classically grand and gilded like the artifacts too elite for his local museum – so he actively rejects all of it.  O’Connor charms us through it all and is on the same wavelength as his writer/director, so he is able to elevate his performance that otherwise could easily lean too far one way with a less subtle or an out-of-sync actor. 

The Mastermind is Reichardt’s homage to, and simultaneously, rejection of the heist genre, pulling inspiration from the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville and reveling in the grey area of what is lost through imitation.  Echoing some of our favorite heist films while never indulging us in that same adrenaline or thrill of the chase, The Mastermind is a hard film to recommend, but in today’s turbulent world, Reichardt’s film does open up enough to reveal that she has spun this web because she has her sights set on the cushy and insulated suburbs.  While the protests against the Vietnam War rage around him, J.B. could not be less tuned in as his community is torn apart, and while he may walk the streets thinking he is above such petty concerns, the concerns of the world are far bigger than any of us individually, and certainly bigger than a low-rate, local art thief. 

Despite its ragtag appearance, the film works like a finely tuned machine, with full credit stemming from Reichardt’s adept handling of the tone of the film.  Like children playing superheroes on the playground, but without the benefit of the doubt of youth, J.B. thinks he has the same suave cavalier about him as any of Alain Delon’s smoldering, criminal characters across the 1960s, but from our omnipotent position in the audience, we know he is little more than a lucky fool.  There is no plan, especially once the heist is successful – with an asterix – as he flies by the seat of his pants, ending up in a compromising position without even enough money in his pocket for a bus fare.  With Rob Mazurek’s jazz-inspired score – a genre known for its use of riff and improvisation – his percussion beats help to inject some life into the purposefully slow pacing of the film as J.B. scampers about.  It features a brilliant turn from O’Connor, continuing his impressive run, and while he hits the marks required by the script with near-perfect accuracy, one cannot be scolded for wishing there was a little bit more on the page for him and the rest of the cast to do.  Sparce, even by Reichardt’s own standards, The Mastermind leaves us begging for more in the first and second acts, which is no doubt a testament to her direction both on the page and behind the camera, but spending just a little more time with J.B., even if it is just Reichardt punching down on his apathetic refusal to partake in generally accepted niceties of society would have greatly improved the experience of the film overall.