The cinematic universe of Kelly Reichardt has always been defined by its quietude, its deep respect for physical space, and its profound understanding of people who live on the geographic or social fringes of American life. From the transient wanderers of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy to the exhausted pioneers of Meek’s Cutoff and the tenderly unglamorous bakers of First Cow, her characters are rarely the driving forces of history. Instead, they are people trying to survive the quiet grinding gears of economic and systemic reality. When word emerged that Reichardt was turning her sights toward a 1970s period piece centered on an art heist, a certain sector of film culture experienced a collective double take. A heist movie by Kelly Reichardt sounded like a stylistic contradiction. Classic heist cinema belongs to the smooth, kinetic, and mathematically precise worlds of Jean Pierre Melville or Michael Mann. Reichardt operates on an entirely different frequency, one where the silence between actions is far more revealing than the actions themselves.
With The Mastermind, Reichardt addresses this genre expectation by entirely upending it. The title itself functions as a magnificent piece of dry irony. There is no brilliant architect of crime to be found here. There are no split screens, no ticking clocks, and no slick sequences of safecracking soundtracked by cool jazz. What we get instead is a deeply observational, tragicomic character portrait of a man who is profoundly out of his depth. The film is less about the meticulous construction of a crime and far more about the agonizing, slow motion collapse of an individual who genuinely believed he was the exception to the rules of his own mediocre existence.
At the center of this anti heist narrative is James Blaine Mooney, played with a brilliant, hangdog opacity by Josh O’Connor. Known to his acquaintances and accomplices as JB, Mooney is an unemployed carpenter living in the sedate suburb of Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1970. He is a married father of two young boys, tethered to a domestic life that clearly suffocates him, though he lacks the vocabulary or the self awareness to articulate why. When we first meet JB, he is visiting a small suburban museum with his family. As his sharp eyed wife, Terri, played with a wonderfully grounded, exasperated sharpness by Alana Haim, manages the children, JB wanders off. He doesn't look at the art with the transformative reverence of an aesthetic purist. He looks at it with the calculating eye of a small time opportunist.
JB slips a small, unguarded item from the gallery into his pocket and simply walks out. It is a minor theft, almost pathetic in its execution, but it serves as the catalyst for an absurdly inflated ambition. He decides he is going to steal four paintings by Arthur Dove, a pioneer of American abstract art. To finance this grand endeavor, JB doesn't turn to criminal syndicates or sophisticated underworld connections. He borrows money from his own mother, Sarah, an enabling presence played with chilly delicacy by Hope Davis, under the false pretense that he needs the capital to secure a carpentry contract.
Josh O’Connor delivers a performance that anchors the entire film in a state of poetic grubbiness. Following his wildly charismatic turn in Challengers, O'Connor here strips away every ounce of effortless glamour. His JB is a man of heavy steps, slumped shoulders, and an opaque internal life. He treats everyone around him, from his confused young sons to his hired accomplices, as if they are background players in a grand drama that only he truly understands. He speaks in vague, semi philosophical platitudes about individualism and taking what one is owed, mimicking the countercultural rhetoric of the era without possessing an ounce of actual political conviction. It is a masterclass in playing a character who is fundamentally unheroic, someone who confuses a reckless lack of foresight for existential bravery.
While JB fumbles his way through criminal logistics, Reichardt subtly paints the historical landscape of 1970 America around him. The Vietnam War looms large over the narrative, but not in the way it typically does in Hollywood period pieces. There are no sweeping montages of battlefield footage or heavy handed needle drops of protest anthems. Instead, the war exists as a low, ambient hum. It comes through in the crackle of local radio broadcasts reporting casualty counts, the front page headlines of discarded newspapers, and the sudden, sharp political arguments that erupt over dinner tables between hawks and doves.
Reichardt is deeply interested in how macro political trauma filters down into ordinary, mundane lives. The Mooney household is caught in a generational freeze. JB’s father, William Mooney, played with a formidable, unyielding authority by Bill Camp, is a local judge who embodies the rigid, conservative status quo of the American establishment. JB’s turn toward art theft is quickly revealed to be less about a passion for American modernism and more about an unfocused, desperate act of rebellion against the crushing weight of his father’s world. It is the tragedy of a man trying to reject a system while remaining entirely reliant on its structural privileges. He uses his mother’s money to fund a crime against a civic institution, all while assuming that his family’s social standing will protect him from any real consequences.
The contrast between JB’s internal delusion and the external reality is where Reichardt finds a rich vein of deadpan humor. The actual heist, when it finally occurs, is a sequence stripped of all traditional cinematic adrenaline. JB recruits three local men to help him pull off the robbery, including a getaway driver who panics and backs out at the absolute last minute. Driving a stolen car himself, JB watches as his hired thieves, Guy Hickey and Ronnie Gibson, clumsily navigate the suburban museum in broad daylight. The sequence is agonizingly quiet. There is no driving musical score, only the squeak of sneakers on polished floors, the heavy breathing of nervous men, and the sudden, shocking flash of unnecessary violence when one of the thieves loses his nerve and assaults an elderly security guard. It is a messy, unglamorous, and deeply stressful affair that yields four stolen Arthur Dove paintings and an immediate, overwhelming sense of dread.
The true heart of The Mastermind lies in its second half, which Reichardt has described as the unwinding of the plan. Once the paintings are in JB’s possession, the logistical reality of being an art thief sets in. He has zero infrastructure for selling stolen masterpieces. He has no fence, no international buyers, and no safe house. The stolen canvases become literal and metaphorical baggage, wrapped in brown paper and stuffed under beds or hidden in the trunks of cars.
Reichardt, who edited the film herself, paces this section with a deliberate, rhythmic deceleration. She forces the audience to sit with JB in the quiet spaces of his failure. We watch him hide out in a cluttered apartment belonging to his old art school friends, Fred and Maude, played with wonderful, bohemian weariness by John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann. These scenes are rich with the textured, lived in domestic detail that defines Reichardt’s filmography. The camera, operated by her long time cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, remains largely static, capturing the characters within frames that feel heavy, faded, and distinctly redolent of the early 1970s film language. The color palette is dominated by muted earth tones, avocado greens, and the dim, amber glow of floor lamps. It feels like a world trapped in amber, matching JB’s own paralysis.
As the police close in and the criminal reality of his situation deepens, JB’s domestic safety net completely vanishes. A local organized crime outfit learns of the stolen art, leading to an encounter that strips JB of whatever remaining illusions of control he possessed. When he tries to reach out to his wife, Terri, begging for money and trying to rationalize his choices as an act of self actualization, she simply hangs up on him. Alana Haim’s performance in these brief telephone scenes is devastating. She doesn't play Terri with hysterical anger; she plays her with a cold, absolute exhaustion. She is a woman who has realized that her husband is not a misunderstood visionary, but a selfish, reckless liability to their children.
The film’s final movement achieves a strange, transcendent power as JB is reduced to a transient state, stripped of his car, his money, and his family. Unable to afford a bus ticket to cross the border into Toronto, he resorts to stealing an elderly woman’s purse in a crowded public square. It is a moment of total degradation, a far cry from the romanticized image of the high stakes art thief he had cultivated in his mind.
In a stroke of narrative genius, JB flees from his petty crime straight into the middle of a massive, chaotic anti Vietnam War protest rally. The camera loses him for a moment in a sea of young people carrying signs, chanting slogans, and facing down lines of riot police. When the police violently break up the demonstration, charging into the crowd with batons and tear gas, JB is swept up in the chaos. He is beaten, subdued, and arrested alongside dozens of young activists who are putting their bodies on the line for a collective, deeply felt political cause. JB, who entered the space purely as a selfish predator trying to escape a purse snatching, is literalized as a historical fraud. He is granted the aesthetic of a countercultural rebel, arrested by the state in a cloud of tear gas, while possessing none of the moral substance behind it.
The Mastermind is an extraordinary addition to Kelly Reichardt’s body of work because it takes the framework of a classic American genre and uses it to critique the myth of American individualism. JB Mooney is a character who believes that freedom means the right to operate entirely outside the boundaries of community and responsibility. By the time the credits roll on this beautifully shot, deeply melancholic 110 minute film, Reichardt has exposed that belief for what it truly is: a lonely, self destructive delusion. It is a film that rewards patience, offering a masterclass in tone, performance, and historical specificity that lingers in the mind long after its quiet, ironic final frame.
For dedicated physical media collectors, MUBI's boutique physical release of The Mastermind offers a handsome addition to the shelf, prioritizing tactile aesthetic value over an exhaustive list of digital supplements.
The Mastermind is available to own today!
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