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Harry Lehman (John Turturro), a New Yorker pushing 70, is facing a dystopian scenario in Noah Segan’s poignantly nostalgic drama: planned obsolescence.
He still diligently shines his wingtips every morning, gets excited about ‘renting a tape from the library’ (Barbara Stanwyck is his favourite), and treats people with gentlemanly courtesy. True, he also happens to be a pickpocket. But once he’s taken what he needs, he throws the wallets in a mailbox so his victims can get everything else back.
Unfortunately, as the title suggests, Harry is increasingly a man out of time. And the clock really starts running when he lifts a bag from Dylan (After the Hunt’s Will Price), the spoiled scion of a New York crime family. As it happens, Dylan has been hiding a USB drive holding a non-fungible token worth nearly $1 million in that bag. Harry, of course, has no idea what the drive is, and casually tosses it to someone else. He also doesn’t realise that there are cameras on every corner of the city. So it’s not long before Dylan tracks him down, and gives him an ultimatum: either Harry finds the drive, or his entire world implodes. It’s Dylan who brings up obsolescence, but – as a wry pawnbroker (Steve Buscemi) notes – it’s Harry who’s facing it.
Harry’s most important relationship is with New York itself
Turturro is impeccable as an old-fashioned man who has always lived by his own code of ethics, for good and ill. Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a retiring detective, are equally locked in, and fully understand that their role is to support Turturro’s exquisite central performance. In contrast, Price's exaggerated swagger feels especially unsubtle next to his more experienced castmates, while an underwritten plot about Harry’s catatonic wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave) seems like a misguided attempt to flesh out Harry’s story.
In fact, Turturro is so good that we can intuit everything we need to know just from Harry’s posture and the watchful way he holds himself within his elegant cashmere coat (complete with interior pocket designed to hold swiftly lifted wallets). And it’s clear that despite his devotion to Rosie, the most important relationship in his life is with New York itself.
As the camera follows Harry along avenues and across bridges, soundtrack brimming with percussive jazz, Segan finds ways to remind us of a city that simultaneously never was, no longer is, and can still be found. Out-of-order payphones, cranky newsstand owners, graffiti-covered trains: these all exist, if you’re looking. Most of us aren’t. But if Harry teaches us anything, it’s to locate the treasure hidden deep inside the mundane. For an afternoon, at least, his New York is a world well worth visiting.
In US theaters Oct 30. In UK and Ireland cinemas Nov 26.