Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Whether as Barton Fink in the Coen Brothers’ eponymous film, Herb Stempel in Quiz Show, or John Stone in The Night Of, John Turturro has wielded haplessness as a tool of disarmament. Never has he done it so deftly as in Noah Segan’s neo-noir indie instant classic The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. It’s a mordant tribute to New York City then, now, and forever – but especially then, circa 1995 – spiritually akin to a Nora Griffin painting. Turturro is Harry Lehman, a smooth analog bandit in a graceless digital world. He doesn’t use cell phones or any other contemporary accoutrements and doesn’t want to. He has gotten along like a wilier Ralph Kramden, living in a kip in The Bronx, caring stoically for his catatonically disabled wife – which tracks more as New Hollywood angst than warped humor – and fencing his daily yield through a pawn shop run by an old friend named Ben of kindred throwback sensibilities, played to grimily honorable perfection by, inevitably, Steve Buscemi.
The lovable thief and the heist gone bad are very familiar tropes, but here they’re freshly inflected. Like Johnny Hooker in The Sting, Harry inadvertently steals from the wrong guy. The mark, Dylan, looks harmless, like a hedge-fund manager’s spoiled, vape-sucking kid, sporting a padded baseball jacket to make him look buff, a gold chain to make him look ghetto, and a cherry ’69 Plymouth Barracuda to make him look like a gearhead, fraudulent as a young Hegseth must have been. Whereas some guys are born to it, says Harry late in the movie, this one must have worked hard to be such an asshole. The trouble is, his grandmother is a crime boss and the swag includes a valuable USB card that, it turns out, affords its possessor unique access to abundant cryptocurrency. Thinking it worthless, Harry through Ben foists it and other digital junk on a more up-to-date Chinatown fence, who distributes it. Dylan identifies Harry via closed-circuit camera footage and threatens to kill his wife unless Harry retrieves the USB card.
Harry, natch, prefers human intelligence, which comes from Ben and Allan Warren, a world-weary mensch of a street detective (Giancarlo Esposito, sagging and savvy) with whom Harry is oddly simpatico. There’s plenty here for the humanistic Luddite: Harry has the kind of strategic wit that people like Dylan, helpless without next-gen gear, lack. Over the course of a workday, Harry completes his mission in Brooklyn, tutors a promising young operator he spots on the subway, and in Queens visits his estranged daughter, a piercing Tatiana Maslany, whose monologue supplies hard truths and existential heft. Harry, for his part, ensures that he has lived a good life, sharing epiphanies in a heavily tinted SUV with Moira, Dylan’s disappointed and ruefully hardwired grandma, cannily rendered by Jamie Lee Curtis. Such closure is rarely possible in twelve hours. But you want to believe it can happen with retro guile and old pals like Ben and Allan in the city that grows them, its power captured in Segan’s sooty Ozu-esque crannies as much as the elegiac riverside tracking shot that ends the film, shimmering, aloof, and defiant.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, written and directed by Noah Segan. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, 2026.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
