The Mastermind

The Art of Coming Undone

I’ve watched plenty of museum-robbery movies. They usually come with a blueprint on a grimy table, a montage of slick people syncing their watches, and a bassline that screams “these guys know what they’re doing.” Kelly Reichardt’s *The Mastermind* wants nothing to do with that. Instead, it opens on James Blaine Mooney—J.B. to his friends—drifting through a quiet Massachusetts gallery in 1970, looking less like a criminal mastermind than a man who can’t remember where he left his car. In the first minutes he lifts a small wooden figurine, slips it into his wife’s purse, and keeps moving. Not for cash. Just because.



Reichardt’s whole career has been built on watching people scrape along the margins—trudging through Pacific Northwest muck or hustling through gig-economy America. This time she trains her eye on something different: the smug cushion of middle-class suburban entitlement. The setup nods to the 1972 Worcester Art Museum robbery, but she refuses the legend. J.B., an unemployed carpenter living on the patience (and money) of his wealthy parents, decides he’s going to steal four Arthur Dove abstractions. The plan is awful. The help he recruits is even worse. And the suspense isn’t “will he pull it off?” so much as “how long until that unearned confidence turns sour.”

It’s also, in a sneaky way, very funny—though it may take you a while to realize you’re watching a comedy. Christopher Blauvelt’s hazy autumn cinematography makes everything look like an old Polaroid left in a drawer, while Rob Mazurek’s jittery jazz score keeps hinting at a cool, professional operation the characters never manage to become. That mismatch lands hard. It’s the gap between the guy J.B. imagines himself to be and the mess he actually is.



There’s a long unbroken shot in the middle that’s been stuck in my head. J.B. tries to stash the stolen Dove canvases up in a loft. It takes forever. He heaves them around, gets tangled up in his own limbs, pants like he’s just run a mile, and looks completely lost. The camera doesn’t rescue him; it just watches. Reichardt makes you sit with the dull, unglamorous aftertaste of the theft. Stealing the thing is easy. Living with it—and figuring out where to put it—is the part that breaks him.

Josh O’Connor plays J.B. as weaponized mediocrity. After playing magnetic, scruffy rogues in *Challengers* and *La Chimera*, he keeps the rumpled look but drains out the charm. So much of the performance is avoidance: the way his shoulders fold when his fed-up wife, Terri (Alana Haim, wonderfully restrained), asks a simple direct question; the crooked smile he tries to use as a universal get-out-of-jail card. The brutal joke is watching that smile stop working. He’s trying to outrun Vietnam-era dread humming from the TV by inventing his own personal catastrophe.



Writing for *Sight & Sound*, Beatrice Loayza nailed the movie’s pulse when she called it "more of a coming-undone film than a heist film or even an anti-heist film." That unraveling is exactly where Reichardt finds what’s human in it.

In the end, *The Mastermind* isn’t really about art, or the mechanics of fencing stolen goods. It’s about the stupid, reckless moves people make when they start to feel invisible. J.B. doesn’t need the money. He needs to believe he’s steering his own life instead of sleepwalking through a world he can’t be bothered to understand. It’s quiet, maddening, and—against your better judgment—kind of endearing. You want to shake him, but you can’t look away from the slow-motion wreck he’s building.