Movie Review: Real-Life Students Rob Their Uni Library for Millions in "American Animals"

American Animals is a heist movie based on a true story inspired by heist movies. You can’t make this up. Or can you?

In 2004, a quartet of American college students committed a brazen daytime robbery of rare books from their university library.

Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Still, what did they expect? To prep, they watched heist movies, and taking a prophetic leaf from Reservoir Dogs, adopted the names Mr. Black, Mr. Yellow, Mr. Green and Mr. Pink. Err, maybe they didn’t get to the fatal end of Tarantino’s bloody debut; otherwise, they might have gone with the more reliable monikers Danny, Rusty, Basher and Linus.

Anyway, that’s the story of American Animals, which the opening credits tells us isn’t just based on a true story, but quite simply is a true story, having occurred at the Transylvania University in Kentucky (and, sadly, not actual Transylvania, because that would have kicked this whole thing up a notch).

However, writer-director Bart Layton pokes holes in the idea of objective truth by having the real crims share their sometimes-conflicting memories through talking head interviews, while actors Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner and Jared Abrahamson re-enact their planning, operation and aftermath. Occasionally, the perpetrators offer a different take on how an incident went down, so Layton rewinds the tape and restages it from a different vantage point. It’s like VAR, except, tragically, no-one mimes a square to the camera.

The film is radically entertaining. Yet, so was Layton’s last project, The Imposter, a gnarly, stomach-churning doco that privileged the perspective of a conman who pretended to be the missing son of a grieving family. The titular imposter painted the family as conspirators in a murderous cover-up, and Layton, tantalised by the cinematic quality of the mystery, let him do it. The picture was "good", in theory, but gross.

That’s why I approached American Animals with concern, and a bottle of Mylanta. Thankfully, it’s not so queasy-making, even though Layton once again lets actual criminals take center stage. That's admirable, of course, so long as the filmmaker doesn’t fawn over his unreliable subjects, as in The Imposter. It becomes worrying when he minimises the voice of the victims. And that does kind-of happen again, with the real-life librarian hostage (played in re-enactments by The Handmaid’s Tale’s Ann Dowd) given shortest shrift.

At least American Animals smartly blurs the authenticity of the "truthful" re-enactments by having them openly questioned or interfered with by the interviewees. The Imposter, by contrast, mostly let the conman’s version of events play out without interrogation. Now, you don’t have to feel conned too.

Layton doesn’t let his book-stealing subjects entirely off the hook either, and the whole enterprise is tinged with their reflective regret. For that, the director deserves credit for drawing candid responses from his subjects (who are, nonetheless, seeking redemption). And the young cast, especially Peters as the wild and enigmatic ringleader, do the feature a massive favour by building the characters out as complex and sympathetic without turning them into victims of circumstance.

Don’t get it twisted: American Animals isn’t merely a thought experiment about who gets to claim ownership of the truth. It’s also a cracking heist flick, with several thrilling centrepieces. The performances are solid, and the fusion of genres is novel and, importantly, easy to follow.

And though it references many other flicks, it’s Bonnie and Clyde that American Animals honours thematically, with Layton suggesting these four bored students were inspired to turn criminal just to shake up their otherwise ordinary lives. The irony, which not even Layton can openly admit, is that their deepest hopes have likely been fulfilled by American Animals. Doing something terrible, and then getting a movie made about it: What’s more American than that?

4/5

In Australian cinemas 4 October. Rated MA15+ for strong coarse language.