The Mastermind finds writer-director-editor Kelly Reichardt in a more playful (but no less observant) mood than usual. Her first period piece since 2019’s friendship-poeticizing First Cow, it takes place in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1970, and introduces her latest in a long lineage of unhappy, toiling protagonists: J.B. (Josh O’Connor), a constantly out-of-work carpenter with a wife (Alana Haim) and two sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) who relies on his moneyed parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis) to alleviate his seemingly never-ending periods of financial precarity. 

As The Mastermind opens, J.B. is, unbeknownst to his family, deep into plotting — though not as thoroughly as is logical — a heist. The fictional Framingham Museum of Art is his target. There he’s looking, with the help of a couple accomplices, to swipe a quadrant of abstract Arthur Dove paintings in broad daylight. The film begins during one of many afternoons he’ll spend casing the space, whose alarm system-less security is so lackadaisical (we see one guard nodding off while perched on a wing-overseeing stool) that J.B. manages to successfully palm a small figurine propped up in an unlocked display case during a visit. The quasi-erotic charge one associates with the heist film — something hard not to feel when seeing people triumphantly swipe something undetected — is encouraged by Rob Mazurek’s seductively shuddering jazz score, though Reichardt has spoken of wanting not to unduly tap into the subgenre’s crime-romanticizing qualities.

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Photo credit: MUBI