Light Touch, Hard Times: The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
To stick with this year’s road terminology, Highlights is our festival interstate—the broadest route, one you can hardly miss (and really shouldn’t). This year, however, it opens with a film far more at home on crowded subway platforms and the grimy backstreets of New York’s five boroughs. The first title joining Highlights, the flagship section of the 17th TAURON American Film Festival, is Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.
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Harry Lehman has a deft touch—in his line of work, that’s a compliment. After all, he’s a pickpocket. The problem is that his trade is becoming obsolete. Passersby have nothing in their pockets, watches no longer tempt as they once did and are mostly used to count steps, cash-filled wallets are increasingly rare, and everything valuable is now stored on a phone. Then, one night, Harry unwittingly steals from Dylan Diamond (Will Price), heir to a ruthless crime family, and ends up with a valuable USB drive. He is given 24 hours to return it—or the family will come after his disabled wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave).
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, dir. Noah Segan
The film has a distinctly heliocentric structure, with leading man John Turturro as the sun around which everything else revolves. The director built the cast around him, bringing together actors with whom Turturro shares both a personal and professional history. Harry’s pawnbroker friend Ben is played by Steve Buscemi. The two worked together as far back as the Coen brothers’ early film Miller’s Crossing, but haven’t shared the screen since collaborating on Romance & Cigarettes, directed by Turturro in 2005. Giancarlo Esposito plays Detective Allan Warren—his last film with Turturro was Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing in 1989.
Writer-director Noah Segan is an actor known for Looper and the Knives Out trilogy—and, as it happens, a fourth-generation New Yorker. Finding a fresh way to portray the Big Apple is no easy feat, even for someone who has known the city all his life. Fortunately, Segan cites Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrara—chroniclers of this same New York—among his inspirations, alongside Coppola’s The Conversation, in a rather different vein. Ultimately, however, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is less a portrait of the city than an expertly told story of a small-time criminal. It undoubtedly helps that both Turturro and Segan are, as cinematographer Sam Levy (Lady Bird, Frances Ha) reveals, huge fans of Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket.
The film arrives in Wrocław following stops at Sundance, Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival—where, fittingly for a pickpocket, it has already stolen the hearts of more than a few moviegoers.
