Nightcrawler [Review by Haus]

Nightcrawler protagonist Lou Bloom is an empty, exploitative, teeth-gratingly awkward automaton and a weirdo of the utmost order.  He’s also an instant film icon and an absolute hoot to watch.

Congratulations: You’ve read one twentieth of this review and already have nine tenths of the point. I’m good like that.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou, an under-educated loner who papers over his utterly vacant self by dispensing self-improvement truisms to just about everyone he encounters.  He’s pedantic and stilted to the extreme, like watching a ventriloquist dummy read Tim Ferriss‘s business blog. And he has all the polyester smarm of a door-to-door scam artist.  Dust off your creep-o-meter, and get ready for Lou to bury that needle for two hours straight.

In short, Lou breaks all convention as a lead character: He’s not likeable, sympathetic, or decent, and experiences no real personal journey to speak of. He’s hollow, emptiness, a  man without scruple or conscience or soul or limit. And he’s the perfect mirror to hold up in what is in reality a savage takedown of shock journalism.

Nightcrawler opens with a crisp meditative musical montage of nighttime L.A.–like some reverso Woody Allen film–and builds slowly from there. This L.A. is a land of tired normal people with small lives and smaller hopes, deaf to canned platitudes and trudging on–a land of gleaming nightscapes and raw tragedy bathed in camcorder-mounted LEDs. (You could see it just for the visuals.)

After happening upon an accident and seeing some at work, Bloom sets out to become a “stringer”–a graveyard-shift independent journalist who, armed only with camcorder and police scanner, darts around the sprawl filming gory car crashes and shooting victims and so on. (Aside: These guys exist! I remember seeing several YouTube videos by Loudlabs News which now seem eerily similar.) Arriving on the scene sometimes even before the emergency crews, Bloom leverages his complete lack of compassion or social understanding to nab the best and goriest shots around.

Now honestly, just this on its own probably would have made for a fairly interesting movie, but it gets better: Bloom latches on to a struggling nighttime manager at a low-ranked local TV news station (expertly played by Rene Russo) and the two goad each other well into the depths of yellow journalism.

Along the way Lou hires an assistant (Riz Ahmed), a functionally illiterate downtrodden kid with his tail so far between his legs that he’s almost willing to work for free, and also buys a shiny red Challenger SRT8. His “independent news-gathering agency” in place, a small thriller-type story unfolds. I won’t tell it here.

Now, Nightcrawler is either a withering satire or a full-wail lament of fear-mongering local news as well as our own rubbernecking instincts that fuel it. The genius of its approach is that by making the protagonist a human shell, any blame for his actions must land squarely on the shoulders of the news media.  Russo and her kind make Lou what he is.  You watch it happen.  I may prefer my social commentary a little more subtle, but with a film this wildly enjoyable it’s hard to complain. Comparisons to Network will abound.

Throughout, Nightcrawler dangles the carrot of moral justice just barely out of reach.  Lou’s sad-sack assistant is an occasional voice of common sense, but he’s again and again slammed to the mat for it.  And one of my favorite scenes has Russo’s hard-boiled, seen-it-all news veteran suddenly squirm as Lou gets his hooks into her.

I’m making this film sound a bit weird because it is. Nightcrawler is visually beautiful yet hard to watch. Go see it. You’ll get a unique story, some fairly sharp social commentary, a voyeur’s look at nighttime L.A., and an absolute slam-dunk performance by Jake Gyllenhaal.

Haus Verdict: Beautiful, novel, unorthodox. Most cringeworthy protagonist probably ever. An instant classic and a real blast. See it.