I happen to like this film / I happen to love this picture
John Turturro, the recognizable and prolific character actor who’s been acting in film and television since 1980, finally gets a leading role worthy of his talents in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. His performance in this moody, wistful, and captivating crime thriller may just nab him his first Oscar nomination.The second feature film written and directed by actor Noah Segan, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York cribs its title from the classic 1970 Simon and Garfunkel song “The Only Living Boy in New York.” That song also inspired a dud of a 2017 film of the same name. Fortunately, Segan’s picture not only hews more closely to the song’s themes of isolation and loneliness, but also beautifully captures the bittersweetness of trying to adapt to a rapidly shifting, unfamiliar landscape.
Turturro plays Harry, an old-school New York pickpocket whose livelihood is threatened by too many credit cards and not enough cash in purloined wallets. When Harry lifts a gym bag with a USB crypto wallet card in it belonging to a crime family, the film’s action jump starts and doesn’t let up until its subtle and poignant ending. Harry doesn’t understand what the keycard-looking bit of plastic is and cluelessly disregards it as he pawns the bag’s other contents to his pawn-shop owner friend Ben (Steve Buscemi). But after the card’s owner, Dylan (Will Price), the crime family’s entitled jerk of a scion, threatens Harry’s unwell girlfriend Rosie (Karina Arroyave), Harry undertakes a frantic quest to retrieve the card and return it to its owners.
In style and tone, Pickpocket is reminiscent of other great New York-set recent mad-dash crime caper films like Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme. But indie theater programmers seeking a brilliant double bill should take note: the film’s terrific jazz score (by Emmy-winning composer Gary Lionelli) and thematic undercurrent of a fading analog world make it more similar to another melancholic look at an aging New Yorker struggling to cope in a new era. Both the Willem Dafoe-helmed Late Fame from earlier this year, with its exploration of social media replacing coffee house culture, and Pickpocket, with its look at a New York overrun with cell phones and crypto, examine what we lose when impersonal technology, not human connection, become the norm in city life. That Segan drops the phrase “planned obsolescence” into his script is no accident.
But don’t be put off by the picture’s weighty and downbeat themes. They are masterfully executed, both in Segan’s script, and as interpreted by the excellent cast. Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito, as an an empathetic detective, Tatiana Maslany as Harry’s estranged daughter Kelly, and Jamie Lee Curtis, in a brief but crucial tête-à-tête with Harry, all create vivid and intriguing characters that keep us fully engaged in the unspooling story.
The film is bookended by two lovely New York-centric songs. “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” by LCD Soundsystem (which coincidentally was just used in a pivotal episode of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This) opens the film, and the Cole Porter classic “I Happen to Like New York” plays over its plaintive ending. Like the song that inspires the film’s title, both tracks speak to the ache of wanting so much to stay fixed in a time and place that we know and embrace, even as we learn–sometimes the hard way–that change is inevitable, and can’t be stopped.
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The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is currently playing, including at the AMC Metreon, Apple Van Ness, and the Regal Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco; the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville; the Rialto Cinemas Cerrito in El Cerrito; and the Cinemark Century theater in Pleasant Hill.
