American Animals is based very closely on a true story – the 2004 attempt by four college students in Kentucky to steal several rare books from Transylvania University’s special collection, including John James Audobon’s The Birds of America. Rather than unfurling as a traditional heist movie, however, the script focuses more on the four kids involved, interspersing interviews with all of them throughout the movie to try to get at why they tried something so stupid and so incredibly unlikely to work.
Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters) are both friends living in Lexington, Kentucky, where Reinhard attends Transylvania and studies art, when he sees the Audobon book on an orientation tour of the library and learns it’s worth about $12 million. He tells Warren, and during one (or more) of their weed-fueled conversations, they decide to try to steal and sell it, less for the money than for the adventure, as Warren in particular talks about how pointless and empty their lives seem to be. They eventually recruit accounting student Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson), who at least brings some rational thinking to the logistical planning, and Chas Allen (Blake Jenner), the getaway driver, and spend months cooking up a plan after doing “research” like watching old heist movies. The robbery itself goes very poorly and they’re arrested not long afterwards, but by that point in the film, the theft seems beside the point, as the unclear motivation of the four stooges overtakes questions of whether it’ll work.
The movie starts with confessional interview clips with the real Reinhard and Lipka, as well as comments from their parents and an old teacher or two, before shifting into the ‘fictional’ part of the movie (although the intro takes pains to tell us the story is true). Director Bart Layton continues to sprinkle comments from the four men, all since released from prison, throughout the film, and uses their differing recollections to show the same scene in two ways, and elucidate how unreliable our memories can be. The trick is clever, although I’m not sure it gets enough to what seems to be the main point of the script, which is that no one, including the four men themselves, can fully explain why they wanted to do this or thought it might work. They refer to it as an “adventure,” which sort of makes sense, until the plan starts to involve subduing the librarian through force, which should have snapped at least one of these four out of their delusion. They’re clearly not dumb, although the plan itself was; Reinhard and Lipka are both thoughtful and articulate, and with the more reticent Borsuk they all seem better able to express now how ill-considered the plan was and how remorseful they feel now for the people they hurt. But can being bored and maybe a little rudderless in life really take a kid like Reinhard, who appears to have never been in any trouble before this, and make him the co-mastermind of a multi-million dollar heist?
The problem with American Animals isn’t the story, but the direction by Layton, who also wrote the script. Layton, perhaps best known for the documentary Imposter, has made his first non-documentary feature here, and has far too heavy a hand, making his influence felt everywhere in the movie when he needed to just let it breathe. The constant rotating camera shots are beyond distracting to the point of dizzying – it’s clearly a gimmick for Layton, and it adds nothing to the film at all, especially since scenery is never the point here. The music is even more distracting; the movie uses few songs contemporary to the time of the planning or heist, with a ton of music from the 1970s, and the volume is often overpowering.
The actors playing the four thieves are solid, although Peters particularly stands out for his portrayal of Lipka as the driving force behind the plan – emotional, erratic, daring, and above all charismatic. Keoghan gets at the hesitation Reinhard expresses in interviews after the fact, although he gives the sense throughout the film of someone who’s physically and emotionally tired more than someone who’s bored and looking for a thrill. And nothing the actors do can touch the emotional responses the men give in confessional clips shown at the end of the movie, where several fight back tears (of shame or embarrassment) as they consider the consequences of their actions. Maybe American Animals would have worked better as a straight documentary, or just if Layton had eased up on the throttle and let the story drive the direction more.