My Name Ain't Johnny

The Carnival of Privilege

If Brazilian cinema of the early 2000s defined the drug trade through the blood-soaked lens of *City of God* and *Elite Squad*—films where the favela is a war zone and survival is a miracle—*My Name Ain’t Johnny* (2008) offers a jarring, necessary counter-narrative. Directed by Mauro Lima, this is not a story of desperation, but of boredom. It is the drug trade sanitized by the soft lighting of the Zona Sul penthouses, a film that asks what happens when the dealer is not a soldier of fortune, but the boy next door who simply never learned the word "no."



The film chronicles the true story of João Guilherme Estrella, a middle-class "bon vivant" who drifted into becoming one of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest cocaine distributors in the early 90s. Lima frames Estrella’s descent not as a spiral into darkness, but as an endless, hyper-accelerated party. The visual language is kinetic and pop-infused, mirroring the manic energy of a cocaine high. We are whisked from Rio's beaches to European capitals with a breeziness that borders on the insolent. The camera loves the excess, seducing the audience just as easily as Johnny seduced the Rio elite. We are complicit in the fun, riding shotgun in a narrative that refuses to judge its protagonist for his hedonism.

At the center of this storm is Selton Mello, delivering a performance of slippery, magnetic charm. Mello does not play a gangster; he plays a host. He imbues Estrella with a wide-eyed, almost childlike detachment from the consequences of his actions. Even as he moves kilos of product, there is no malice in him, only a terrifying spiritual vacancy. He treats the judiciary and the penal system with the same devastating wit he uses at dinner parties. In one of the film's most telling motifs, Estrella seems genuinely baffled by the concept of "illegality," viewing his operation as simple supply and demand—capitalism stripped of its moral brakes.



However, the film’s true weight lies in its subtext regarding class in Brazil. *My Name Ain’t Johnny* is inadvertently a study in judicial privilege. When the party inevitably ends, the "system" that grinds the poor into dust pauses to scratch its head at Johnny. He is too well-spoken, too white, and too connected to be a "criminal." The narrative pivot toward the insanity plea—orchestrated by a sharp lawyer and accepted by a sympathetic judge (the formidable Cássia Kis)—exposes the grotesque inequality of the law. Estrella is not punished; he is "treated." The film creates a suffocating sense of reality where the safety net for the wealthy is woven from steel, while for others, it doesn't exist at all.



Ultimately, *My Name Ain’t Johnny* stands as a fascinating, if somewhat forgiving, portrait of a specific slice of Rio society. It lacks the visceral punch of its grittier contemporaries, but that is precisely the point. It is a crime drama where the only casualty is time wasted. Lima has crafted a film that feels like a hangover after a decade-long carnival—a glossy, entertaining, and slightly disturbing reminder that in certain zip codes, even crime is just another lifestyle choice.