Amer­i­can Animals

In order to under­stand why four young, mid­dle-class, white men from Ken­tucky would risk seri­ous prison time by steal­ing some of the world’s most valu­able books from their uni­ver­si­ty library, direc­tor Bart Lay­ton shrewd­ly choos­es to blend fact and fiction.

The real men appear in inter­views to each give their ver­sion of events, their diverg­ing tes­ti­monies func­tion­ing as the ever-shift­ing build­ing blocks of the fic­tion­al­i­sa­tion that Lay­ton presents with a cast of bril­liant actors. The two mas­ter­minds are Bar­ry Keoghan as Spencer Rein­hard, a young painter wor­ried that his life is too safe and bor­ing to make him a good artist, and the excel­lent Evan Peters play­ing bad boy War­ren Lip­ka, always up for send­ing a ​‘fuck you’ to the sys­tem. Mak­ing their delu­sions of grandeur clear­ly vis­i­ble, this nar­ra­tive device is more than a gim­mick: they are lit­er­al­ly the stars of their own movie.

Look­ing back to the clas­sics of crime cin­e­ma, depic­tion is not always endorse­ment, but deny­ing the appeal of, say, Ster­ling Hayden’s hard­boiled thief in Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Killing would be disin­gen­u­ous. Glam­orous­ly defy­ing soci­ety has always been an entic­ing fea­ture of cin­e­ma, and the (anti-)heroes of Amer­i­can Ani­mals have also suc­cumbed to the appeal of gang­ster movies.

What sep­a­rates them from you and I is that they main­tained their sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief after the end cred­its – or rather nev­er sus­pend­ed it in the first place, instead tak­ing Kubrick’s high-fly­ing act at face val­ue. Inspired by the heroes of Quentin Tarantino’s Reser­voir Dogs, Rein­hard and Lip­ka, with addi­tion­al mus­cle in the form of Eric Bor­suk (Jared Abra­ham­son) and Chas Allen (Blake Jen­ner), planned and exe­cut­ed, in 2004, one of the most auda­cious and ludi­crous heists in mod­ern history.

The jux­ta­po­si­tion of doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion film­mak­ing in Amer­i­can Ani­mals reveals the dan­ger­ous pow­er of imag­i­na­tion. Once Rein­hard got it in his head that he could steal valu­able items which Dan­ny Ocean would not hes­i­tate to stealth­ily make his, it only took Lipka’s brava­do to get the snow­ball rolling. Soon enough, their lives became con­sumed by plan­ning the per­fect rob­bery. Lay­ton goes much fur­ther in his attack on self-fic­tion­al­i­sa­tion. Eras­ing the line between fact and fan­ta­sy, he makes the real-life pro­tag­o­nists face the plau­si­bil­i­ty of their sub­jec­tive rec­ol­lec­tions by hav­ing them phys­i­cal­ly enter his reen­act­ments and talk to their impersonators.

This bru­tal con­fronta­tion is at once exhil­a­rat­ing and eerie. Open­ing up new pos­si­bil­i­ties for ​‘based on a true sto­ry’ nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma, it reminds us of our unavoid­able account­abil­i­ty to the truth: the men soon realise that none of them know exact­ly what hap­pened because each was too pre­oc­cu­pied with his own ​‘truth’.

When a bystander is hurt by the group’s fool­ish and deeply self­ish actions, Lay­ton returns to the talk­ing heads as the young men awak­en to real­i­ty. Shak­en out of their day­dreams, they are final­ly out of words, sob­bing and try­ing to avoid the camera’s inescapable gaze. From the absurd sto­ry of four self-cen­tred and bored friends, Lay­ton has cre­at­ed a pow­er­ful hybrid film which decries, with enter­tain­ing panache and urgency, the utter non­sense of ​‘alter­na­tive facts’.