Stranger-than-fiction teen heist gets the Hollywood treatment
“American Animals” takes an appropriately wild approach to its subject, biting off a little more than it can chew, but nevertheless coming up with a truly novel entry in the overcrowded heist genre.
In his feature debut, director/writer Bart Layton chronicles the odd but true story of four young men who hatched an elaborate scheme to steal rare books from a Kentucky university in 2004, the grand prize being John James Audubon’s enormous tome “Birds of America.”
Layton mixes truth and fiction with abandon, enlisting the real four men to chime in alongside the actors playing their younger selves. As ringleader Warren, the charismatic Evan Peters (“X-Men Apocalypse”) convinces his stoner artist buddy Spencer (Barry Keoghan) that a grand, no-one-gets-hurt robbery is just what they need to shake off the yoke of life’s encroaching normalcy.
Early on, the film’s tone is light, with the real Warren and Spencer questioning each other’s renditions of how it all went down. As they enlist more humorless pals Eric (Jared Abrahamson) and Chas (Blake Jenner), though, the proceedings get increasingly dark.
By the time Warren’s squaring his shoulders to tase the rare-books librarian (Ann Dowd, always a treat), “American Animals” has veered from sorta-true-crime quasi-comedy into a Scorsese-inflected look at the realities of attempting a theft of this magnitude.
Sweat, tears, vomit and rage replace the usual smooth stylings of a cinematic heist, and although this might not all tonally flow, it’s clear you’re watching a dazzling new directorial career taking flight.