Rebel Without a Clue

Elizabeth Alsop picks up the trail of Kelly Reichardt’s alienated art thief in “The Mastermind.”

By Elizabeth AlsopNovember 7, 2025

• Film

• Cultural Studies

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, fresh takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers.

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EARLY IN KELLY REICHARDT’S new film, The Mastermind, protagonist James “J. B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor), sits down for an extended-family dinner, having just accomplished—barely—the theft of four Arthur Dove paintings from the local art museum. His father, openly disapproving of his son’s slacker ways, offers a dismal assessment of the heist, not knowing J. B. was its titular “mastermind”: “I’m not entirely convinced they thought this through.” A few scenes later, another character echoes the sentiment, telling J. B., “Honestly? I don’t think you’ve thought things through enough.”

They have a point. If heist films typically fetishize process—lavishing runtime on meticulous preparation for the crime, followed by its high-wire execution—in Reichardt’s film, the prelude to the theft is limited to a one-off conversation in J. B.’s basement, where he tosses pantyhose eggs to his affiliates (they’ll need masks, after all). It’s less a question of getting the gang back together than one of strong-arming a few warm bodies.

On the day of, J. B.’s half-baked schemes quickly go sideways: he forgets that his kids don’t have school; his getaway driver backs out; a cop is eating lunch at the rendezvous spot. In a scene that distills the group’s subprofessionalism, one of his designated bagmen wastes precious seconds cranking open the back window of the car—a behemoth station wagon—so he can slide the stolen loot into the trunk. Ratted out by a member of his crew, J. B. leaves town, and The Mastermind becomes an accidental road movie, whose shambolic antihero—a failson who can’t accept that he’s failed—seems both surprised by and curiously detached from this turn of events. Watching J. B. mount the stairs to yet another bus, I flashed to the refrain from the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”: Well, how did he get here?

The Mastermind is a movie about what can happen—how quickly things can unravel—when you are alienated from your own life. Set in 1970, the film is full of characters similarly disillusioned with the status quo; this is a world of student activists, anti-war protesters, and returning Vietnam vets. J. B. temporarily seeks refuge with his former art school friends, Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), poster children for the counterculture, who are living their best “rural life”; earlier, he crosses paths with a rival group of criminals, who steal what he has stolen. But the difference is that these nonbelievers have chosen to drop out and tune in with other people. Even Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964)—another film about an attempted heist featuring a memorable set piece in an art museum—had a band.

J. B., by contrast, is alone. He’s a rebel who could have a cause, a common one, if only he could recognize it. As it stands, he’s unable to see beyond his own private dissatisfactions to register the public discontents all around him. “Weird times, huh?” one of his would-be affiliates observes. But J. B. doesn’t notice, not even when he finds himself, literally, in the midst of the social upheaval: swept up, as he is in the final sequence of the film, into a mass of protesters. It’s no accident that we see these signs of cultural unrest only in the edges of the frame, since that’s how J. B. sees them too. The revolution is just beyond his consciousness, registered only peripherally.

Public enthusiasm for the recent Louvre theft—seemingly accomplished with little more than a ladder, a scooter, and some French moxie—confirms it: people love a good heist. But what about a bad one? As much as we enjoy a dose of “competence porn,” it’s the ineptitude on display in Reichardt’s ironically titled film that may serve the more salient social function. These days, it’s no secret that we’re surrounded by men who hijack first and think later; who want to “move fast and break things”; who feel entitled to take what they want, when they want it, and expect to get away with it; who think they’re much, much smarter than they are.

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Among its signature pleasures, the heist film offers audiences a spectacle of highly choreographed expertise. From Rififi (1955) to Sneakers (1992) to the Steven Soderbergh canon (Out of Sight, Logan Lucky, Oceans 11–13), the genre has generated some of cinema’s most powerful allegories of collective action—individuals working together to best their arch-capitalist rivals. But heist films also satisfy another fantasy: of a world in which individuals are asked to do the work, and only the work, for which they are best suited. As Fredric Jameson put it, the heist film is “always in one way or another an inscription of collective non-alienated work that passes the censor by way of its rewriting in terms of crime and sub-generic entertainment.”

The Mastermind is an exception to that cinematic rule. Rather than imagining a world in which everyone employs their singular talents—as safecrackers, demolitions experts, or smooth talkers—and reaps the rewards, Reichardt uses the genre to deliver a less utopian message, and to allegorize a distinct moment in postwar American history, in which individuals could less reliably organize against economic interests, and the biggest cons were being run not by private citizens but by state entities.

In the Q and A that followed the New York Film Festival premiere, Reichardt insisted on the film’s 1970 setting, and the year matters. Watergate—history’s most famous failed robbery—was on the horizon, and things were about to get worse for American workers. As Jill Lepore notes, in a review of several recent works of US labor history, it was at this moment that “key labor-movement achievements—eight hours a day, often with health care and a pension—unravelled.” Lepore continues: “The idea of the family wage began to collapse […] Income inequality had just begun to rise. In places like the United States and the United Kingdom, manufacturing was dying, and so were unions.”

The Mastermind anticipates this decline. Characters move through a postindustrial landscape—Ohio, passing for New England—full of shuttered storefronts. It is J. B.’s wife Terri (Alana Haim) who goes to work every day while he stays home; to offset his downward mobility, he cadges money from his mother (Hope Davis). With its shiftless yet charismatic protagonist, the film itself looks back to the New Hollywood era, and to the “pathos” that Thomas Elsaesser saw in its stories of failed ambition. Unlike the hyper-principled vigilantes of Reichardt’s earlier Night Moves (2013), J. B. shares with his 1970s cinematic antecedents an absence of belief in anything other than his own exceptionalism: the vague sense that fortune should favor him, that he is destined for great things.

In a prolonged sequence that seems designed to showcase the character’s misplaced faith in his own genius, J. B. drags the four paintings and their wooden shipping container up a rickety ladder to the hayloft he intends as a hiding place. Reichardt shoots this inelegant procedure with characteristic patience in its full, real-time duration, emphasizing the dogged effort—not skill—involved. In these moments, The Mastermind recalls last year’s adaptation Ripley, a similarly deglamorized take on Patricia Highsmith’s career criminal Tom Ripley as less a generational “talent” than an enterprising hustler, a portrayal that emphasized the thankless labor involved in his grift.

But Reichardt’s film might be even better understood as an analogue to the prestige TV genre Michael Szalay calls the “black-market melodrama,” whose characters’ recourse to illicit second lives and jobs is conditioned by “long-wave deindustrialization.” Like his television successors, J. B. is unable to “imagine a collective other than the family,” nor can he “imagine a meaningfully collective family.” At one point, J. B. places a call to Terri that recalls a conversation in Breaking Bad (2008–13), when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) finally admits to his wife that “all the things” he did were not, in fact “for the family”: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.”

Reichardt adds a comic twist to J. B.’s own confession: “[I]t’s been for you and the kids … and me, yeah!” he concedes, before further qualifying, with hilarious precision, that maybe “three-quarters of what I’ve done was for the good of our family.”

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So why does J. B. do what he does? The Mastermind largely confines us to his perspective, but there is one telling shot untethered to his point of view, in which audiences glimpse a fully outfitted woodworking studio. He alludes to his ambitions only in passing; at several points, he lies to his mother and Terri about a carpentry commission. But beyond watching him hammer together a plywood container to transport the paintings, we never see him at work.

In this sense, The Mastermind qualifies as a darker companion piece to Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022), an offbeat, quietly ebullient film about the joys of making art. If The Mastermind starts in much the same way—with shots of artwork in close-up—the narrative quickly swerves to focus not on the artist at work but on the artist not at work, possibly out of work, and seemingly unable to move on from their ambitions. Never in the film does J. B. look happier than when he pauses, after the theft, to hang one of the Dove paintings on his own living room wall, which he steps back to admire.

Is J. B. stealing art because he can’t make his own? In his study of the heist film, Daryl Lee suggests that the genre tends to conflate criminal and creative activity, presenting its protagonists as “rule-breaking artist-geniuses.” Here, the theft hardly rises to the level of high art, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reflect—in some form—the displacement of artistic ambition. Reichardt, who teaches at an art school, seems attuned to the consequences of creativity thwarted. It feels significant that for the Framingham Art Museum’s exterior, she used the I. M. Pei library building in Columbus, Indiana: the setting of Kogonada’s Columbus (2017), a movie that makes the case for aesthetic experience as nothing less than lifesaving.

Without some absorbing ambition, The Mastermind implies, we easily lose our bearings. Late in the film, J. B. sits alone in an empty room, as the camera pans 360 degrees, suggesting just how completely the character is caught in a loop of his own devising. The easy physicality of Josh O’Connor’s performance (he spends much of the film’s first third ambling around in his boxers) might initially obscure the fact that this is a character only going through the motions. But his disaffection is clearly telegraphed by costume, as he is increasingly forced to wear other people’s clothes: shirts that are too big, pants that are too short, suits that don’t suit.

Following the screening, NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim compared O’Connor, with his handsome, hangdog looks, to 1970s-era Elliott Gould. But by the time O’Connor’s character discovers another man’s passport hanging in the closet of a rented room, he put me more in mind of a different cinematic avatar: David Locke, as played by Jack Nicholson in The Passenger (1975), another film about trying to discard your identity and become someone other than who you are.

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Tempering the film’s downbeat plot, however, is a dry humor, the same one that counterbalances the curmudgeonly spirit of Showing Up. Reichardt, in other words, may be entering her funny era. If her films have always had comic beats, these last two feel looser, less inclined toward the kind of sober-mindedness that led Richard Brody to call Wendy and Lucy (2008) “granola cinema.” At one moment, for instance, J. B. expresses surprise that Maude seems less than thrilled to be harboring a fugitive. “You’re aloof,” he says, and Reichardt holds the reverse shot of Gaby Hoffman’s expression—all dazed incredulity, like what did you expect, asshole—just long enough for it to land as a punch line.

The jazzy score, by Rob Mazurek, lends additional buoyancy. Then there’s the film’s immersive, at times almost overwhelming sensorium, its meticulous recreation of the material culture of the 1970s. From fabrics to furniture to cars, The Mastermind evokes the textures of an era built from wood, glass, and metal. It’s almost shocking to encounter a world free of plastics and defined by literal manual labor—gestures done by hand, not by a swipe or the click of a button. An incidental effect of the film may be to induce, rather than nostalgia, a powerful longing for a predigital moment.

If The Mastermind is a period piece, however, the dilemmas it raises feel intensely relevant today. In her post-screening comments at the NYFF, Reichardt described The Mastermind as a film that asks whether you can actually “stay apart” in the manner J. B. attempts—essentially, whether nonengagement in the face of intensifying social crises is a practical or an ethical strategy. One answer is furnished by the O. Henry–esque conclusion, when J. B. is caught, albeit for the wrong reasons.

“There’s been a mistake!” he yells, but it’s not the one he thinks. Just when we think we’re the mastermind—convinced of our own powers, safely removed from the fray—is when we’re most at risk of becoming a pawn.