The pickpocket is a doomed profession, and everybody in the trade knows it. You cannot lift a cancelled credit card off a stranger and pay your rent with it, and there is nothing in an empty pocket where a wallet used to live, just a phone that tracks its owner across the city. That obsolescence is the beating, breaking heart of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a film that hands John Turturro the kind of soulful lead role he has spent forty years deserving and quietly steals your heart in the process.
An Old Thief in a Cashless City
Opening in New York and Los Angeles theaters on October 23 before going nationwide on October 30, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York stars Turturro as Harry Lehman, an aging thief who has worked the streets and subways since the 1980s and takes genuine pride in his analog craft. The problem is that the world has stopped cooperating. The fat wallets and gold wristwatches of his heyday have given way to easily-cancelled plastic and trackable phones, and Harry, who steals mostly to care for his ailing, non-verbal wife, is watching his livelihood evaporate one contactless tap at a time. Then he lifts the wrong item, a mysterious USB stick tangled up with cryptocurrency, from the wrong young man, and finds himself in a five-borough race to return it before a vengeful crime family catches up with him.
It is a lean 88 minutes, and by the accounts of everyone who caught it at its rapturous Sundance premiere earlier this year, it is a small gem. The film went on to a prestigious slot at the Berlin festival before Sony Pictures Classics scooped it up for this fall release. Turturro is surrounded by a murderers’ row of fellow character-actor royalty, including Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, and Tatiana Maslany, plus a genuinely delightful surprise cameo from a bona fide A-lister, and Knives Out alum, as the crime family’s fearsome matriarch. Sam Levy’s cinematography drapes the whole thing in an elegiac glow, and a funk-inflected score gives it the swagger of vintage Big Apple grit.
The Rian Johnson Regular Steps Up
Here is the pedigree that ties it all together. The writer-director is Noah Segan, and if his face is familiar, it should be. Segan is one of the most beloved character actors in the Rian Johnson repertory company, a fixture in essentially every film Johnson has made since giving him his start in 2005’s Brick, from Looper to the Knives Out pictures, plus the Poker Face series. He has a wonderful origin story, having reportedly been fired from a McDonald’s commercial for eating fries wrong before Johnson rescued his career. Now, following his 2022 directorial debut, he has stepped fully behind the camera for his sophomore feature, made under Johnson and Ram Bergman’s T-Street banner, with Johnson himself among the executive producers.
Full disclosure, we have not always been the warmest house on Rian Johnson’s own films around here. When Knives Out arrived, our take was decidedly cool on its particular brand of self-satisfied coyness, and reasonable people can keep arguing about that. But this is a reminder that Johnson the producer and mentor is a genuinely valuable figure, the kind of established filmmaker who uses his clout to get idiosyncratic, unfashionable, mid-budget passion projects like this one financed and into actual theaters. Handing a distinctive protégé the resources to give John Turturro a career-capping showcase is an unambiguously good use of Hollywood capital, and the results speak for themselves.
And make no mistake, the results belong to Turturro. One of the great character actors of his generation, a legend of the Coen brothers and Spike Lee universes, he has spent a career stealing scenes in supporting roles. Here he finally gets to carry the whole picture, and reports from the festival circuit suggest it is among the finest performances of his life, a controlled, tender, code-driven study of a proud man refusing to become obsolete.
A Dying Art, a Vanishing City
For the film buffs in the room, the deeper pleasure of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is how consciously it converses with the past. The pickpocket is one of cinema’s great figures, from the spiritual austerity of Robert Bresson’s 1959 masterpiece Pickpocket to the sweaty Cold War paranoia of Samuel Fuller’s subway-set noir Pickup on South Street. Segan’s film plants itself firmly in that lineage while updating the stakes for the age of Apple Pay, turning a story about a thief into an elegy for an entire mode of being. Harry is not just a criminal running out of marks. He is the last practitioner of a craft, an analog man drowning in a digital sea, and the movie mourns his obsolescence the way it mourns the older, rougher, more textured New York that produced him.
There is a lovely irony baked into that, too. In an era when so many so-called New York movies are actually shot in Ireland or Atlanta to chase tax rebates, dressed up with a couple of establishing shots of the skyline and hoping you will not notice, this one was genuinely made on the streets it loves, dragging its hero through all five boroughs. A film about the disappearance of authentic old New York is itself a defiantly authentic act of New York filmmaking, a throwback in its bones as much as its story. That doubling is the sort of thing that separates a real movie from content.
See It Where It Belongs
Fittingly for a film so devoted to the tactile and the vanishing, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is opening the old-fashioned way, only in theaters, no couch option on day one. That is the right call for a picture this rich in texture and place, and it is worth honoring by actually showing up. A great actor finally getting his moment, a distinctive new directorial voice, and an aching, funny, big-hearted love letter to a city that keeps paving over its own past. Catch it in New York or Los Angeles on October 23, or wait for the nationwide expansion a week later. The last living pickpocket has earned a big-screen send-off.
