The Only Living Pickpocket in New York: It’ll Steal Your Heart If You Let It

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

Some movies give you a handy peg on which to hang a review. What a star turn! Amazing set design! That waitress who barked at the characters in the diner: “What DON’T you want?”*

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is not so kind. It’s not so much a peg as a coatrack. Casting, acting, locations, music, score, sound design, editing, cinematography, costumes, writing and directing, the last two by Noah Segan, who’s mostly an actor but may want to give up his day job after this one.

It stars John Turturro, who was born in Brooklyn and wears his New Yorkerdom as easily as he does the Ermenegildo Zegna coat his character dons in the film.

Read our interview with Pickpocket co-star Tatiana Maslany

Harry’s also a New Yorker, and a pickpocket, and a damn good one. The opening scene finds him removing a wallet from an unsuspecting businessman, played by John Gallagher Jr. Not content with just showing us the lift, the film follows the mark to the restaurant where he discovers his loss.

Harry, meanwhile, finds no bills in the fold, looks disappointed, and drops some trash into a bin on the street, but the wallet in the mailbox next to it. That move tells you more about him than two pages of dialogue. Did I mention the movie is also just 88 minutes long?

Harry’s next mark is Dylan (Will Price), driving a classic muscle car with the vanity plate ITSA1969. Harry breaks into the vehicle with the help of a penny and finds a duffel bag containing a gun; the first sign that his prey might also be a predator. But he also walks away with a wad of cash and a USB crypto wallet, which he takes to his friend Benny (Steve Buscemi), a pawn shop owner.

Benny, of a similar vintage as Harry (and much older than that car) doesn’t know what to make of the device, but at least he doesn’t call it “your SP” the way Harry does. He suggests a trip downtown to his friend Frank the fence. The movie makes the journey from the Bronx to Chinatown feel like a trek to Antarctica.

Meanwhile, Dylan has learned of his loss and is tracking the USB, aided by a posse of doofuses. Segan, on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial, clearly has no love for the Z generation, and paints Dylan as a layabout who would be insulted by the term “feckless” once he learned what it meant. He’s also part of an influential but never named crime family, putting Harry in well over his head.

Segan has assembled a crack team of artists to help him tell this story. Gary Lionelli’s score is a sax-heavy jazz medley that wouldn’t be out of place in the original Shaft. Sam Levy’s cinematography mixes roving wide shots (the better to replicate Harry’s miss-nothing gaze) and long lenses that flatten perspective, so that his character looks like he’s close to the camera but is constantly being eclipsed by pigeons, pedestrians, and Porsches. (Hey, he’s walking here!)

Sparse, snappy dialogue sketches out various relationships, including Harry’s comatose wife (Karina Arroyave in a marvellously understated bit of acting) and Benny’s granddaughter Eve (Victoria Moroles), whose modern-day tech knowledge will prove invaluable to a man who doesn’t even have a cellphone. (He gives someone his digits in one scene, adding the anachronistic phrase: “I’ll be at this number soon.”)

But it’s the little touches make all the difference in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a film in which even the title sounds like it’s from the ’70s. Take Dylan’s wallet. (Harry did!) It’s made of Velcro, while I’d guess Harry’s is crafted from animals it’s illegal to kill any more.

And check out the rogue’s gallery of supporting players, including Kelvin Han Lee as Frank, Lori Tan Chinn (Orange Is the New Black) as his wife, and the great Giancarlo Esposito (he and Turturro were both in Do the Right Thing) as Detective Warren, a world-weary cop with a grudging respect for the old dipper.

Oh, and — no, that would be telling. Suffice to say there’s a killer cameo in the final act, after which I invite you to stay for the lovely long pan across Manhattan, and a list of credits that includes pickpocket consultant Apollo Robbins. Didn’t I tell you this film had everything?

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Directed by Noah Segan. Starring John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, and Victoria Moroles. In theatres October 30.

*2016’s Hell or High Water; rest in peace Margaret Bowman.