Grand Larsony
I frankly would not have believed it would work as a movie if not for the good word of mouth. It certainly doesn’t work on the pitch alone. It might be enough to make you curious, enough to make a memorable prime-time news segment or magazine article: A man cracks the code of the game show Press Your Luck to win seeming infinite money so long as he can keep his nerve. That’s a hook, sure. But it’s not a story.
And yet The Luckiest Man in America works. Credit to the writers and filmmakers for figuring out how to use the style and well-rendered sketches to build it into something flavorful and rich. Terrific staging, little swerves into dream logic, and set production depicted as a gameshow hellscape give the film a backbone. The film has just enough strangeness and palm-sweating suspense to be one of those comedy-dramas that’s more an uncomfortable thriller. It’s what indie filmmaking ought to be: idiosyncratic, stylized, pushing past its limitations with voice and character. Give me more movies like this.
The real life premise: it’s 1984, and Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) is a broke Ohio ice cream truck driver with a gambler’s instinct and love of any sort of hack-the-system scheme. One day, he sneaks into a taping of Press Your Luck and after charming the right producer (David Strathairn) with his loser quirkiness ends up on the game board. I don’t want to spoil exactly what happens in case you don’t already know the historical outcome, but it’s fascinating enough to be trivia for any lovers of history and small-scale enough to only appear in local papers. The film is not just an exaggerated reenactment of the wacky incident, it’s a slow-burn character study.
The film is completely carried by Paul Walter Hauser, who plays Larson with a hypnotic blend of sad sack vulnerability and twitchy anxiety. It’s a fearless and deeply textured performance: self-deprecating, anxious, and layered with enough awkward energy that you’re never quite sure whether you’re rooting for him or watching through your fingers. He deploys a hundred different gestures and vocal inflections to sketch a version of Larson who is just too neurotic to be the folk hero a man in his position might be. It’s the best lead performance I’ve seen this year.(Also: Great wig. Ugly and glorious.)
The screenplay, by Maggie Briggs and director Samir Oliveros, does occasionally feel like it’s stretching a footnote into a feature. Larson is magnetic, but the orbiting cast of backstage producers and staffers, while capably written and acted, aren’t compelling enough to carry their own subplots. The film pads out the runtime with detours and dead-ends, especially in the stop-start rhythm of the game show itself. But those breaks also give the movie room to build color and tension on the margins, which ends up being part of the charm.
Oliveros brings a clear, heightened vision to the story as director. He stages the bulk of the film, especially the game show sequences, as a lightweight thriller, all slow crescendos of tension paying off in buzzy, heart-pumping payoff during the game in action. The film is helped immensely by the production design from Lulú Salgado and art direction by Diego Garcia, which leans into a exaggerated, almost surreal aesthetic. The gameshow set is a beige-neon piece of expressionism, the raised, enclosed seats of the contestants evoke both a torture chamber and a revolutionary tribunal. The sound design is terrific, too: I absolutely love the jittery sound of the Press Your Luck spinner. Its erratic beeps and bloops become an abstract electronic score, warping into a digital heartbeat for Larson with his money on the line.
The supporting cast is full of quasi-familiar faces: some you might recognize but not have seen in awhile, some will be fresh. Walton Goggins plays host Peter Tomarken with just the right blend of smarm and sincerity (that dental work really paying dividends). Strathairn brings uneasy authority as a game show exec. Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones pops up as a sympathetic studio hand. Johnny Knoxville pops in for a bit. My favorite minor performance: Patti Harrison, one of my favorite rising comedians, of I Think You Should Leave and Theater Camp, whose work I’ll keep hyping until she gets the household name. (“Do you understand the tables are my corn?”)
At the film’s most colorful moments, something more profound emerges from the film’s quirkiness. There’s implied commentary on American ambition and delusion — how a broken modern society makes us more desperate to push our own luck. There’s Larson’s loneliness and sad fatherhood as someone who can’t provide or connect: it’s broken relationships and untrustworthy institutions all the way down. The film doesn’t belabor these points, but the execution of the film is flavorful enough that this thoughtfulness pops.
I’m also grateful that the movie doesn’t chain itself to historical accuracy. The story is true in broad strokes, based on a real person and a real episode, but it’s richer here as a retro-futuristic folktale and portrait than it would be as a linear telling of a moment. From what I’ve read, the real-life Larson was more conman than underdog, and far less charming than Hauser’s portrayal. But one of my fundamental beliefs as a movie lover is that factual fidelity should be secondary to emotional truth and dramatic power. Give me a story, not a textbook. The Luckiest Man in America obliges.
There’s a peculiar energy to The Luckiest Man in America, and while it’s not a perfect film, it’s an easy one to admire. It wobbles a bit in the third act, especially in a plot turn where the producers suddenly decide they’re fine being bankrupted for a publicity stunt, but it never threatens to lose steam or become boring. This is a dramatized blip in television history turned into something tense, funny, and even a little touching. It shouldn’t work, but somehow, like its protagonist, it spins and spins and never hits a Whammy.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.