New York has always been a city that eats its own. Neighborhoods turn over, storefronts flip, and the people who set the rhythm of a block get priced out of the song. Noah Segan's "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" understands that a city's soul was never just its skyline. It lived in the hustlers, the regulars and the old pros who knew how the street breathed. So what happens to them when nobody carries cash anymore?
That is the question humming under Segan's crime thriller, which opens nationwide Oct. 30 from Sony Pictures Classics. John Turturro plays Harry Lehman, an aging Bronx pickpocket working a trade the city has digitized out of existence. Wallets are thinner. Payments are a tap. Nobody looks up. Harry is a craftsman whose craft has been declared obsolete, and he keeps showing up to work anyway, because the bills keep coming and because his wife, Rosie, depends on him.
Then he lifts the wrong pocket. A USB stick taken off a stranger turns into a payday, and the payday turns into a borough-hopping race against a dangerous crime family that wants its property back.
Segan, best known as an actor in Rian Johnson's films, makes his second feature as writer-director (after "Blood Relatives"), with Johnson and Ram Bergman producing. He builds it with the patience of 1970s New Hollywood, when a crime picture could stop and simply watch a man think. Sam Levy's cinematography gives the city a grainy, lived-in warmth, the New York of John Cassavetes and Spike Lee rather than the glass-tower postcard. Gary Lionelli's score stays out of the way, and Hilda Rasula's editing keeps the whole thing at a lean 88 minutes. There is no fat here and no showboating. The film trusts its actors to carry it, and they do.
Even the title is a wink at the city's memory, a nod to Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York." Segan isn't chasing nostalgia for its own sake. He is asking who gets remembered when a city rewrites itself.
Turturro, 69, has spent four decades being the most interesting person in someone else's movie. Here he gets the whole frame, and he fills it with a performance built on economy and dignity. Harry doesn't plead with the modern world or sneer at it. He reads people, adjusts and keeps moving, a professional who knows his worth even after the market has stopped paying for it. Turturro lets the exhaustion show without ever letting Harry become pitiful. It is a soulful, funny, quietly devastating piece of work, and easily one of the best of his career.
The supporting bench is a who's who of New York independent film: Steve Buscemi, Tatiana Maslany, Will Price, Victoria Moroles and Jamie Lee Curtis all bring real texture to a story that could easily have been a one-man show.
The casting move that hit me hardest is Giancarlo Esposito as Detective Warren. In 1989, Turturro's Pino and Esposito's Buggin' Out went to war in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" over whose faces belonged on the wall of a Bed-Stuy pizzeria. More than three decades later, the two men return to a New York that has changed more than either of those characters could have imagined. Seeing them share this city again isn't just a casting stunt. It is film history standing in the frame, a reminder of which artists built the image of New York that Hollywood still borrows.
That lineage matters. The film is an elegy for a city, but it is also a tribute to the generation of actors who made that city feel alive on screen.
What Segan understands, and what Turturro plays so beautifully, is that being out of date is not the same as being out of value. Harry's skills haven't vanished. The world just stopped looking. For anyone who has watched an industry, a neighborhood or a whole way of life move on without asking permission, this film lands close to home.
It is also a rare thing: a grown-up crime picture with stakes, humor and heart that doesn't need explosions to keep you leaning forward. If the academy is paying attention, this could bring Turturro his first Oscar nomination, a long-deferred acknowledgment for an actor who has been doing this level of work all along.
"The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" is a minor-key New York classic in the making. Go see it in a theater, and take someone who remembers when the city still had room for people like Harry.
"The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" is rated R and runs 88 minutes. It opens nationwide Oct. 30 from Sony Pictures Classics.
