'The Mastermind' Review
"The Mooneys are [...] very much a prototypical tight-knit American family in the vein Reichardt’s so good at drawing."
This piece by Skyler Hanrath was originally published on our site in November 2025.
The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s ninth feature, plays a bit like a Coen brothers movie on cough syrup (complimentary). There’s a hazy, considered quality to its look and pacing that, while almost par-for-the-course in her work, very much distinguishes it from your bog-standard “dumb guy with a scheme” crime movie. The film centers on James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor), the dope of a dad to two curly-haired moppets (brothers Sterling and Jasper Thompson) and the husband to Terri (Alana Haim), the Mooney’s steady, frustrated breadwinner. While the Mooneys are, on their face, a sort of prototypical tight-knit American family, they’re very much a prototypical tight-knit American family in the vein Reichardt’s so good at drawing.
Across her previous films, Reichardt’s made a cottage industry of crafting her scraggly, hyper-specific little nuclear families. Sometimes they’re found, sometimes they’re biological, sometimes they’re with animals; but each she sets against varied social winds that knock them on their asses, and has us watch as they try (and, often, fail) to squirm their way back to standing. In Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow, the winds are the dangers of recklessly trying to make new lives far from home in the hostile west, in Night Moves, they’re eco-activism going dangerously awry, in Showing Up, they’re the tiny slights and inconveniences of life in an arts community, and in The Mastermind, they’re the Vietnam War and being too dumb to know not to try to pull off an art heist when you’re just no good at pulling off an art heist.
J.B.’s a funny type of loser. An art-school dropout and unemployed cabinet maker in Massachusetts in 1970, he’s very much feeling the weight of his failures when we meet him. He lies to his mother about some upcoming work to get her to loan him money, he badmouths a friend who’s doing better than him at similar work, and on and on. When he hatches a scheme to turn his rotten financial prospects around—he’s going to rip off four Arthur Dove paintings from the Framingham Museum, where he and his family are regulars—he does so with a kind of matter-of-fact, “well, why wouldn’t I?” frankness that’s borderline refreshing. For all the tough-guy criminals dreaming up their next big score in your Den(s) of Thieves, there’s a genuine novelty to seeing a softboi humanities washout trying his hand at brazen theft. It being the 1970s, J.B.’s plan is pretty straightforward—he’ll drive getaway while two accomplices take the paintings off the walls, load them into canvas bags, and rush past the museum’s sleepy security guards. There isn’t any surveillance to worry about, nobody’s going to trace their phones—so long as they make it out and keep their mouths shut, they’ll get off scott free.
Of course, they blow it almost immediately. J.B., it turns out, is a Dove-head going way back to his heady school days, where at least one of the paintings he stole used to reside, decorating the wall of his thesis adviser’s office. Whether or not that particular connection could be the one to pull his whole scheme down around him never proves to be an issue, as it happens. The cops never even have a chance to connect him to the crime by digging into any of the pieces’ histories directly. Rather, when one of his accomplices in the heist (Javion Allen), gets caught robbing a bank, he immediately gives J.B.’s name up. And when his other accomplice (Eli Gelb) dimes him out to a gaggle of local crooks who rip the paintings off yet again, he lights out of town for good. And while what follows manages to be a further downshift still—the “criminal on the run” of it all, for me, was a touch less engaging than the “criminal getting in over his head” movie that set it up—O’Connor’s a game, companionable enough presence to make even J.B.’s shittiest behavior watchable.
He stops by his friend Fred (John Magaro)’s place, looking to hide out for a while, only to ultimately get turned away by Fred’s partner (Gabby Hoffman), who sees right through him. He turns down Fred’s offer to get him out of the country, as he’s not interested in being classed among the draft dodgers he’d be living with in Canada. Ever the arrogant incompetent, he ultimately lands himself in the back of a paddy wagon not for the art heist, nor even for his second heist (he violently steals a purse in a late turn, confirming just how low he really is), but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He gets rounded up as a part of an antiwar protest he stumbles into. It’s a Reichardt-y joke on an arrogant character—the kind of guy who took a beat to see what one of his stolen paintings would look like on his wall in place of actually turning it into cash—and a fittingly ugly little twist-of-the-knife to send the guy out on.