Gus Van Sant has always been at his best when he’s looking at people who are completely falling apart at the seams. Think about the drifters in My Own Private Idaho , the isolated teenagers in Paranoid Park , or the kids wandering the hallways in Elephant . He doesn’t really do glossy, manufactured Hollywood drama. He likes the weird, messy, uncomfortable corners of real life where there are no clean resolutions. With Dead Man’s Wire , he’s found a real-life historical subject that fits his entire cinematic worldview like a glove. It is a story that is almost too bizarre and intense to be true, but it actually happened back in the dead of winter in 1977 in Indianapolis. The film covers the stranger-than-fiction story of Tony Kiritsis, an ordinary, middle-aged guy who got so utterly pushed to the edge by his mortgage company that he snapped. In a state of pure, manic desperation, he wired a live, sawed-off shotgun directly to a banker’s neck with a complex system of wire and a dead man...