American Animals review: Hardboiled heist thriller teeters on the edge of comedy

Director Bart Layton famously used fictional techniques in his award-winning documentary, The Imposter, about a Tom Ripley-like French con artist who passed himself off as a Texan family’s missing son. In his new film, he flips the coin, making a dramatic feature which plays like a documentary. This is intriguing but very self-conscious filmmaking, blurring lines between truth and fiction. It is not “based” on a true story, the opening credits proclaim; it is a true story. Truth, though, turns out to be a slippery and evasive concept.

The film is about four American college students who plan a low level heist and make a mess of it. They’re not stealing money or gold bullion. They are after rare books from the “special collections” section of a college library. Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) is a young freshman and would-be artist at Transylvania University in Kentucky. (The name might make you think of Bram Stoker but the college really does exist.) Reinhard doesn’t enjoy the reckless excess of fraternity life (the partying, beer drinking, simulated fellatio etc). He is far more interested in studying tortured, suffering painters like Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin. When Spencer tells his delinquent friend Warren about the library’s priceless book collection, Warren is straight onto Google looking for “how to” sites explaining ways to commit the perfect robbery.

Layton deliberately introduces elements of darkness and ambiguity into a story which we think early on, will turn into a bit of a lark. “They were pretty darned good kids,” a real-life witness remembers of the four students who carried out the heist. The director intercuts between the fictional students coming up with their hare-brained scheme and talking head interview material featuring their real-life equivalents interviewed 10 years after the crime, when they are older, wiser and able to look back at their youthful prank with both irony and regret.

American Animals teeters on the edge of comedy. It is meant to be funny but the humour sours very quickly on the day of the actual robbery (which is the day after they originally planned it). There are echoes here of Britain’s 1963 “Great Train Robbery”. The robbers there could have been lovable rogues if it hadn’t been for the uncomfortable fact that they beat the train driver over the head. Here, ringleader Warren (Evan Peters) is similarly violent, albeit very apologetic, to the librarian Miss Gooch (Ann Dowd) who guards the rare books he wants to steal. By tying up and humiliating her, he risks forfeiting any sympathy the audience might have for him.

Manuals on heists are in short supply but the friends study diligently for the robbery by watching DVDs of films like The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi and Reservoir Dogs. (Doesn’t everyone die at the end of that one, someone asks of the Tarantino film.) Warren’s family life is in turmoil. His mother has just walked out on his father. He is on a sports scholarship but rarely bothers turning up for practice. The film presents him as the main instigator of the heist. He is restless and desperate to escape the bland conformity of white middle-class America. Somehow, he is always able to talk Spencer into following his bidding. They eventually recruit two further accomplices, Eric and Chas, also middle-class kids.

Layton fills the film with incongruous music (The Doors, Leonard Cohen) and includes lots of in-jokes. The real Spencer isn’t just seen in interviews but we can spot him in the background during the recreation of the robbery. The most telling footage of Spencer and the real-life would-be thieves comes when they get on to describing the robbery itself. All four fall silent, lower their eyes and look very embarrassed. They simply can’t explain how they became caught up in such a ridiculous scheme.

The director’s attitude towards the characters isn’t clear either. We see them exhaustively applying wigs and makeup (they dress as old men). They’re bright and tenacious but it quickly becomes apparent that they haven’t thought their plan through. One of the strangest, most comic scenes here is of Warren on a trip to Amsterdam to meet a potential “fence” who’ll buy the stolen books. His naiveté is appealing. He has no idea how to deal with hardened criminals. His fellow plotters are equally impractical. Layton plays up the comic side of the heist (they can’t find the key to the glass bookcase, the huge books they’re trying to steal are impossible to carry, the lift malfunctions, the getaway driver crashes etc etc). At the same time, he shows the thieves’ mounting desperation. They’re aware that they’ve crossed a line. They are no longer middle-class students engaged in an end of term prank – they are now criminals. They turn on each other in desperation and panic.

The central mystery of why the four students committed the crime can’t be solved, however many different angles Layton takes to the same story. For Spencer, reinventing himself as a robber is a way of expressing his disdain for conventional, bourgeois society – but he is still terrified about upsetting his parents. He identifies closely with historical figure John James Audubon, the naturalist and artist who went into the wilds in the 1820s to paint The Birds Of America, and whose book on the subject is worth a staggering $12m. Warren seemed driven by a delinquent desire to shock. The money is secondary.

Layton treats his hapless heroes with a mixture of affection and bewilderment. At times, the film seems as hardboiled as the heist thrillers that Warren and Spencer study on DVD but the director never loses sight of the absurdity of the plan or of the bungling amateurism of the perpetrators. We root for them one moment and pity or despise them the next. Whether seen through the prism of documentary or of drama, though, their actions seem equally crazy and distorted.