Midway through Capone, Josh Trank’s scabrous and eerie new film about the final year of the brutal gangster’s life, it falls to Kyle MacLachlan—playing Al Capone’s doctor, Karlock—to break it to Al’s grieving-in-advance family that Al, who of course smokes cigars constantly, really shouldn’t do that anymore. Capone, played by a recognizably unrecognizable Tom Hardy, has just suffered a stroke that triggered a 15-minute dream sequence, you see, and has been left partially paralyzed and further wracked by both dementia and neurosyphilis. “No cigars,” Karlock announces gravely in the aftermath, and the family receives this, not unreasonably, as a death sentence.
“For how long?” asks Al’s brother Ralphie, incredulous. This is meant as a serious question, so I’ll provide a serious answer: forty-five minutes. For the remaining 45 minutes of Capone, Tom Hardy, playing Al Capone as a grumbling, doddering, various-bodily-fluid-spewing grotesque, staggers around with a carrot dangling out of his mouth.
For indeed, having banned cigars, Karlock—who via MacLachlan is exuding the faintest whiff of bleak Twin Peaks slapstick—then immediately produces a carrot, and bites off the end, and pretends to smoke it. Maybe Al can do this instead. Holy shit. “What is he, fuckin’ Bugs Bunny?” asks Ralphie, indignant. The woman sitting next to him starts to cry; meanwhile, Al’s hard-boiled and long-suffering wife, Mae (Linda Cardellini), stares off wordlessly into the middle distance, devastated.
I submit to you that this is a pretty good scene in a pretty good movie, at least partially self-aware of its own self-regard. Capone, which hit the video-on-demand circuit Tuesday ($9.99 per rental on most services) after its planned theatrical run was stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic, is stubborn and macho and perverse and unafraid to look ridiculous. It will play as pure comedy if you insist on regarding it as pure comedy; you’ll get your memes, if you’re in it for the memes. (“Me when the FreshDirect delivery hits,” I tweet, over an image of Kyle MacLachlan pretending to smoke a carrot.) But if you at least try to take all of this as seriously as it takes itself, you might be surprised at how long that illusion lasts. Because if nothing else, I was legitimately transfixed by how this movie sounds.
Hardy, as you might be aware, is not a half-measures sort of dude, and his version of super-famous real-life gangster Al Capone comes across as a debased archvillain in the extended Venom universe. Wow, he looks terrible, with an absence of vanity that suggests a great deal of actorly vanity, the deep creases in his face suggesting he fell asleep on a vinyl couch for 30 years. But he is a frightful and awe-inspiring orchestra unto himself. He hacks, he spits, he wheezes, he barks, he growls, he coughs up half a dozen lungs, he puffs whole arias out of those cigars. “You ever been to Park Slope?” he playfully demands of a cute little girl amid a bountiful Thanksgiving feast, in easily his most charismatic and coherent scene. “Didn’t think so.”
He makes Tom Waits sound like Adele. He sounds like a Muppet gargling the remains of another Muppet. “Jesus, you sound like a dying horse,” observes a mysterious thug named Johnny (Matt Dillon)—that’s another way to put it. “Let’s go fishing,” Capone rasps, hyper-ominously, in Italian, and so they actually go fishing, and soon Capone is screaming, “You fucking bum!,” in English, at an alligator that ate the fish he’d just caught. Holy shit.
Also: This Al Capone pees all over himself shortly after the opening credits roll. And then, unsatisfied, he shits himself, twice, the second time, late in the film, with a Blazing Saddles–worthy pyrotechnic display that interrupts a terse standoff with the FBI. (In Karlock’s first scene, he brings diapers.) There’s the door, the movie grunts, pretty much immediately. This is the truth. Fuck you if you can’t handle it. Also, where else ya gonna go?
“This is what happens,” observes Johnny after an irate Capone guns down the alligator that just stole his fish, “when people spend too much time in Florida.” It is the early ’40s, and our man, having done his bit in prison for, uh, tax evasion, is indeed languishing in a decaying Sunshine State mansion set upon by all manner of yes-men thugs and government spooks and an extra-eerie Ghost Boy holding a solitary balloon. Not the most original image, no, but you tell him.
For indeed, your man is in ultra-bleak and ultra-macho exile, as befits Capone writer-director Trank, a promising young filmmaker who as you may recall flamed out spectacularly with the 2015 debacle Fantastic Four, what with the errant tweets and myriad tales of on-set misbehavior. Trank has styled this film as 10 percent act of humility and 90 percent Fuck you if you can’t handle me. The result is functionally True Detective seasons 4 through 20. Make of that what you will. But as stupefyingly dudely as the result might be, the style is undeniable.
That Capone won’t get even a modest theatrical release is a damn shame; my humble request, if you’re watching via laptop, is that you at least use headphones. This movie sounds incredible; El-P, he of Run the Jewels, did the drone-and-whoosh score, but his touch is shockingly light, and all the more effective for it. There is an ominous, extravagant stillness to everything. A flickering fire. A feral pack of kids frolicking in the distance. An airplane soaring somewhere overhead, likely filled with more government spooks. A crackling radio tuned to either opera or classical or a boisterous radio play about Al Capone the super-famous gangster’s various murderous exploits. The various wheezings and pants-shittings of Capone himself. As a purely auditory experience, this is the ambient album of the year, or anyway the ambient album 2020 deserves.
There is little plot, save some vague and increasingly desperate mutterings about a $10 million cache Capone may have once hid somewhere, if only he could stop hacking up bits of carrot into a gold spitoon long enough to remember where. There is little meaningful human interaction: As Mae, Cardellini has a harsh tenderness to her as she withstands her husband’s various explosions, even when Capone spits in her face and she responds by slapping him straight onto VOD. There is little action-movie-type action, though the violence, when it comes, is remarkably grody. A stoic young man keeps calling collect from Cleveland. Workers arrive to cart off Capone’s regal statue collection as financial ruin looms. At one point you get to watch the big man rasp along to the Wizard of Oz jam “If I Were King of the Forest,” the Cowardly Lion projected right onto his ravaged face and deteriorating body. Then the power goes out, and Capone has a realization: “I gotta take a pee.”
That 15-minute dream sequence, by the way, is itself an auditory feast of horror-flick labyrinthine unease and gangster-flick exploitation that peaks with Capone, arm-in-arm with Louis Armstrong, croaking along to “Blueberry Hill.” Roll with it. Same deal with the delirious climax, which combines various elements—the gold Tommy gun; the bathrobe; the diaper; the screaming; the sound of Tom Hardy spitting, “You’re a piece of shit” in subtitled Italian—in an immensely pleasurable way whether you’ve come to Capone to praise it or to bury it.
Think of the decaying-outlaw ruminations of The Irishman, or Tony Soprano pining after his precious ducks, except with no prestige component whatsoever. This movie, in all its transgressiveness, is so so so much better than the 2018 farce Gotti, and yet I longed to have the same experience with it that I had with Gotti, which is to say stumbling out of a movie theater, stunned by sunlight, alongside a half-dozen fellow patrons at best. What the fuck was that?, we wondered, silently to ourselves, and you can either ask this as a compliment or as very much not a compliment, and Capone, in all its spectral and scatological glory, at least knows the difference.
