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Writer-director Alessio Della Vale’s neo-noir American Night unfolds across one fateful evening in New York City, and it announces its ambitions early. Michael Rubino (Emile Hirsch) has just buried his father and stepped into his shoes as the new head of the mafia. To flaunt the power he now wields, Michael arranges to bring Warhol’s iconic pop-art portrait of Marilyn Monroe to his home. There’s just one problem: the bumbling courier, Shakey (Fortunato Cerlino), loses the priceless piece. And so the hunt begins.
Running parallel to all this is art dealer and forger John (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who is preparing to open his very own gallery alongside his girlfriend, Sarah (Paz Vega). But Lord Samuel Morgan (Michael Madsen) threatens to pull the funding unless John returns to his criminal ways. When John’s stuntman brother, Vincent (Jeremy Piven), suddenly reappears, the couple is pulled into the chase for the missing Warhol, and every thread in the story barrels toward the same fatal collision course.
American Night Turns a Stolen Warhol Into One of the Most Stylish Films
At a hearty 2 hours and 3 minutes, American Night is a little too long, and the bigger issue is that there’s no single scene you could simply lift out to fix the pacing. Della Vale’s script keeps restarting, doubling back to follow one character to a pivotal moment, then resetting to track another. It’s the Pulp Fiction approach to structure, where certain scenes only click into place an hour or more after you’ve seen them. The technique is clever, but it makes the film feel its length. Tightening sequences like the first meeting between John and Vincent, or trimming the “scorpion and frog” detour, would have kept the momentum humming.
What never lags, however, is the way the movie looks. The cinematography from Ben Nott and Andrzej Sekula elevates the entire production to genuine art-status. Della Vale and his directors of photography drew inspiration from several modern pop-art masterworks to shape the film’s aesthetic, and the results are gorgeous. The colors leap off the screen, the lighting is moody and atmospheric, and nearly every frame drips with cool, deliberate style. On a purely visual level, this is one of the best-looking films of the year.
The cast keeps you locked in even when the plot meanders. Hirsch is shockingly powerful here, intense and brutal as Michael. When he promises Sarah a lifetime of happiness, it lands as sincere, yet you can feel the violence simmering just beneath the surface, and the actor smartly resists overplaying that duality until the climax. Meyers is suave and endearing as the in-over-his-head gallery owner, and his voiceover during a flashback of a merciless beating is a standout.
Vega is as charming as ever, even if she isn’t given much to do, while Piven injects a sense of levity the film badly needs. That humor is essential to the movie’s success, because without it, the whole affair would tip into something too dour and self-serious. Madsen’s role is brief, but he’s excellent and lends the proceedings some much-needed gravitas.
“Stylish and engaging, even if it runs longer than it needs to.”
American Night wears its cinematic influences proudly, and yes, it runs too long. But the ensemble is uniformly strong and the story stays engaging enough that audiences never fully check out. Pair all that with the sumptuous photography and vibrant color palette, and you end up with something fitting: a pretty good movie.
Grade: C+
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American Night
A neo-noir set in the New York City's corrupt contemporary art world where the art dealer John Kaplan and the ruthless head of New York's mafia, Michael Rubino, fight for money, art, power and love.
Release Date: October 1, 2021
Director: Alessio Della Valle
Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers , Paz Vega , Emile Hirsch
