Modern life is increasingly difficult for Harry Lehman (John Turturro), whose lifelong pickpocketing career doesn’t yield the same profits it used to in the present year of 2026, where everyone’s money is digital and their consumer electronics are easily trackable and difficult to fleece. Estranged from his daughter Kelly (Tatiana Maslany), he spends his days on the streets and in the subways trying to get together enough money to cover medical expenses for his comatose second wife, Rose. When he manages to lift a set of keys off of a young punk named Dylan (Will Price, who plays Tim Robinson’s son on The Chair Company) driving a classic car, he empties out a duffel with some cash and a USB drive, which he recognizes as a computer gadget but doesn’t know anything else about. When his regular fence Ben (Steve Buscemi) plugs it into the pawn shop’s computer, neither of the old men understand that they’ve managed to tip off the drive’s owner to their location or that they’ve got their hands on a crypto wallet worth close to a million dollars. By the time Dylan shows up to Ben’s shop and ransacks it looking for the crypto drive, it’s already been hawked to Ben’s counterpart in Chinatown, forcing Harry to go on a trek to get it back before Dylan, who turns out to be the scion of a mafia family, kills Rose.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is an elegy for a lost era and a lost city, which it telegraphs from its opening moments, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” It also feels as if it’s drawing inspiration from the 1974 film Harry and Tonto (down to the main character’s name), which was also about a New Yorker experiencing late in life alienation from the city that had been his home for his entire life, and whose situation leads him to a single, meaningful encounter with his estranged daughter. While Art Carney’s Harry goes on an emotionally uplifting journey where we join him in finding a place in a changing world, Pickpocket is a much more bittersweet narrative, as we know from the moment that Ben reveals that Dylan’s family is connected to organized crime that Turturro’s Harry’s days are numbered. Everywhere he goes, Harry Lehman encounters others of his generation who are unable to keep up with the times. His friendly-but-antagonistic relationship with soon-to-retire detective Allen Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) is marked by a mutual respect, but Warren has also been relegated to a basement desk because he “can’t be retrained” for cybercrime; Ben is useless with computers and requires assistance from his granddaughter Eve (Victoria Moroles) for anything more advanced than checking his emails; the crime boss who is Dylan’s grandmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) expresses the same hesitancy about crypto currency as Harry does for cell phones, and is ultimately right to be concerned. The world of crime that they all know and can contemplate, theft on a scale from petty to grand, no longer exists.
The key difference between Dylan and Harry is that for the former, crime is a business. At one point, Dylan complains that his family doesn’t respect that he’s trying to bring them into the twenty-first century by lamenting that they can’t send him off to an Ivy League school and then get annoyed that he’s committed to “first concepts.” For the latter, crime is a way of life. Harry doesn’t moralize his way of “earning” a living, he just does the only thing that he knows how to do, acting as part of a larger economic ecosystem. Dylan is established early on as a fad chaser, as he orders a drink because he was inspired by an influencer and ends up hating it. As the bartender says, nine thousand likes on the video he saw does not translate to nine thousand people trying the drink. This scene also establishes something important about how the two men approach their business; Dylan is loud, flashy, and trendy, and only gets away with what he does because of his family connections, while Harry’s entire mode of being revolves around being unnoticed, quiet, and unassuming, and his line of work ultimately cost him his family. Neither is a particularly good way to live, but it ends up proving easier for an old dog to learn a couple of new tricks than it is for a young buck to learn not to run his mouth; if Dylan hadn’t been so concerned with showing off his smart watch and all of its features to Harry, then Harry would never have had the small victory that he does in the end. Although this could lead to the film feeling too reactionary in a “it’s the children who are wrong” way, the narrative smartly balances Dylan’s arrogance by including both Ben’s aforementioned granddaughter and a young pickpocket that Harry catches in the middle of a lift and briefly mentors.
Turturro is quite good here, although this is such an undemanding role that an actor of his talent could sleepwalk through it (which Curtis does in her single scene). The film goes out of its way to show you that Harry is very talented at what he does. Lock-picking, palm-greasing, and wallet-lifting come to him as easily as breathing; it’s just that those skills aren’t relevant in a more modern world. As such, the film also feels like a comment on the decline of the power of labor in the modern age. Turturro is fun even if he’s not being challenged as an artist, and he and Buscemi have an easy natural chemistry that ensure the film is worth checking out just to see the two of them spend some time together, if nothing else. If one had to choose between Buscemi’s performances in Wild Horse Nine and Pickpocket, his nomination for best supporting actor should be for this one. I’ll admit to some bias because I adore her, but Maslany is the real standout for me here. She fulfills the same role that Ellen Burstyn did in Harry and Tonto as the daughter that our main character has let down too many times. The dialogue is rote and a little trite—”I go to a real job [for my family],” “My family doesn’t get bologna sandwiches from a food bank while I’m waiting for a bond ticket,” etc.—but Maslany is magnificent and wrings pathos from the tired tropes anyway because she’s just that good.
Carefully riding the line between conservative movies that your dad would like because old salts get the upper hand over young upstarts and a lo-fi heist picture, this is one to check out, although it’s not going to be one that you need to rush out to theaters to see on the big screen.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
