When the jazzy, jittery opening of Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” begins with slow, vertically crawling title cards in Bauhaus-like font, you know you’re about to be thrown back in cinematic time.
Shot on film with the grainy warmth that evokes a sleepy 1970 New England municipality as much as it does actual movies from the ‘70s, “The Mastermind” is Reichardt’s version of a heist movie — meaning that the filmmaker hijacks conventions laid by filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Sidney Lumet for a spin that still retains her patient bent for long, luxuriating takes. Here, Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney (what a name!), an art thief who falls down a hole of his own digging, as a poorly hatched job to rip off a series of Arthur Dove abstract paintings from a fictional Massachusetts museum sends his private and family lives careening out of his grasp.
“The Mastermind” is more an aftermath-of-a-heist movie than one about the job’s high-stakes particulars, though Reichardt captures them with breath-bating suspense in the film’s first act. Reichardt, writing her own script, is more invested in the what-happens-after, the slow-drip comedown of J.B.’s catastrophic hubris in thinking he could carry out a grab-and-run robbery in such a small town. Especially when his father (Bill Camp, hilariously curmudgeonly as an old-guard type who sticks his nose up at modern art) is its local judge.
The absorbing setup makes for Reichardt’s purest genre exercise since her eco-terrorist caper “Night Moves” (2013) or her slow-cinema anti-Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (2011) before that. Her observational approach doesn’t always retrofit seamlessly to the genre scaffolding that surrounds it — a structure she will slowly work to topple and destroy as “The Mastermind” grows more languorous — but the period-rich atmosphere she conjures with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt and costumer Amy Roth makes for an intoxicating, transportive experience. And her composition and framing, and eye for 1970 in all its mustardy polyester and corduroy-browns and retro fuzziness, suggest the influence of her dear friend Todd Haynes more than ever, this time around. (Stalwart Reichardt DP Blauvelt also shot Haynes’ “May December.”)
Disheveled and charmingly louche in that unkempt early-’70s way, J.B. is an unemployed carpenter who lives in a sedate Massachusetts suburb with his working wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two boys (Sterling and Jasper Thompson, real-life fraternal twins). He’s in perpetual debt to his moneyed parents (Hope Davis and Camp), and judging by their weekly ritual of a meat-and-mashed-potatoes dinner at mom and dad’s house, he hasn’t strayed far from the nest financially, geographically, or emotionally. It’s 1970, and radio dispatches and television news relay fragmented context about the ongoing Vietnam War, placing an almost apocalyptic backdrop behind the film’s core domestic narrative as violence seeps from afar into the everyday.
A former art history student, J.B. lives a double life as a petty art thief, subtly purloining a small wooden artifact from the glass case of a Framingham Museum of Art gallery in the film’s first scene, almost as a lark, a self-started dare to see if he can do it. That double life extends to covert basement huddles he hosts with his ragtag group of accomplices beneath the first floor of J.B. and Terri’s single-story house (this includes actors Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, and Javion Allen), as he prepares for the next, bigger job. Reichardt doesn’t at all explore the inner life of Terri, though Alana Haim (an established breakout actor after Paul Thomas Anderson plucked her from the music scene for his “Licorice Pizza”) cuts an alluring silhouette in rare moments onscreen — like a shot of her done up in hair curlers heading out to her car, or heard offscreen over a slyly sad, hushed phone call later in the film.
What J.B. has planned next feels doomed from the start, and “The Mastermind” is a study in doom from the start. He and his associates — who all get their own individual quirks and styling, courtesy of Roth and hair stylist Anna Maria Reyer — plan to steal a suite of paintings by Upstate New York artist Arthur Dove (whose abstract pastels were recreated for the film) from the Framingham in broad daylight. Reichardt stages the heist as a nail-biting montage, cutting from inside the museum where J.B.’s men set upon their robbery to within the gold ‘64 Chevy Nova J.B. waits in out front (Reichardt, as with her last seven films, does editing duties, too). Much of “The Mastermind” is spent in cars, either stationary or on the move and the run, Blauvelt’s camera placing us in the backseat or hoodside of the boxy vehicles that are scene stealers of their own.
It all goes to shit, of course, especially once J.B.’s Black cohort Ronnie Gibson (Allen), nylon stocking now unsheathed from his face, pulls a gun on a potential witness out front of the museum. His fate as the scheme unravels and unwinds gets a mostly surface-level racial politics inquiry from Reichardt, and it’s unsurprising when he’s the first one to land in jail. Generally speaking, Reichardt’s social commentary is only surface-scratching, the fractious Civil Rights dynamics and wartime unrest relegated to those TV news briefs, the protest posters papered on walls throughout town. That’s perhaps to demonstrate how unaffected and unscathed that J.B., a comfortably middle-class white guy who comes from a comfortably middle-class family, is from all that noise of draft dodgers, dope fiends, and radical feminists banging on the door. Until he, of course, eventually isn’t.
The fallout of J.B.’s messy hijack is less airtight than its setup, with the cops on the horn and Terri catching scent of what’s going on. “The Mastermind” becomes a lonely existential man-on-the-run movie as J.B. sloppily covers his tracks and tries to disappear; a long take, though, of J.B. attempting to stow the paintings in a barn, dragging himself back home at dawn covered in pig slop, is among the most thrilling of Reichardt’s career. She’s flexing into genre mode while also pulling from her signature paintbox of taciturn character observation, as slow a burn as near-silent moments out of “First Cow” or even “Old Joy.” (Reichardt, too, brings her “First Cow” actor John Magaro into the mix, in a role that feels more like a cameo than anything else.)
There’s also Rob Mazurek’s Bill Evans-inspired jazz score to sink us even deeper into a movie that’s all about capturing a mood, a vibe. Reichardt credits records from Sun Ra and John Coltrane as influences behind the trumpet-and-percussion thrum of the music, though the riffs of Miles Davis’ ennui-and-smoke-drenched “Elevator to the Gallows” score also come to mind, putting “The Mastermind” more in conversation with midcentury art films than the American heist movies whose form Reichardt flouts.
Which means that “The Mastermind,” even with an effectively understated performance from in-demand actor O’Connor as a man trying to outwit his own unraveling, could be a tough sell for audiences outside of the core Reichardt cult. The film spins its wheels toward the end, even while landing on a hilariously macabre final image that feels ripped out of the most nihilistic of French arthouse classics. “Everything I’ve done is for you and the kids,” J.B. tells Terri over the phone at one point, before pausing to add, “And me.”
“The Mastermind” is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick. In that sense, Reichardt has something in common with her antihero: She’s challenged herself to execute a well-trodden shape and style of genre storytelling on her own terms, though she succeeds more than we know from frame one J.B. ever could.
Grade: B
“The Mastermind” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release it in theaters later this year.
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