Movie Review: Nightcrawler

By Less Lee Moore

Now film fans have another name to add to the list of cinematic creepers: Nightcrawler‘s Lou Bloom. He’s got Travis Bickle’s lack of self-awareness and Barry Champlain’s self-aggrandizing thirst for success, and he oozes ad copy-inspired monologues like Patrick Bateman. But who is Lou Bloom?

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bloom with a reptilian, sunken-cheeked intensity, like someone who got hopelessly lost on the way to the American dream. Bloom lives in a shitty apartment in a bad neighborhood in Los Angeles, drives an old Toyota Tercel, and steals chain link fences to sell to construction sites. He could be forgiven for stealing to make a quick buck when he clearly has so few of his own, but it’s his intangible theft that pushes him from pathetic to pathological.

When rubbernecking at a car accident on the freeway, Bloom discovers “nightcrawlers,” the videographer version of ambulance chasers, freelance cameramen who trawl police scanners for gruesome crimes and car accidents, filming the events, and selling the footage to local news stations desperate for “if it bleeds, it leads” ratings. His fearlessness quickly makes him the highest paid stringer for KWLA, the lowest-rated station in the area.

It becomes obvious early on that something is not right with Lou. Every time he gives one of his little uplifting speeches, followed by his crinkley-eyed smile, you get the chills. Oh, it’s not like his motivational words are untrue or uninspiring, it’s just that they feel wrong somehow. You’ll laugh, but then you’ll feel guilty about it after.

Stalwart composer James Newton Howard provides the incongruous score, which sounds like it belongs in a Spielberg movie about a hard-knock life kid who manages to succeed through grit and determination. Only Lou Bloom is not that kid; he’s a sociopath.

This is writer Dan Gilroy’s (Real Steel, The Fall) directorial debut. It’s impressive. There are those who will compare Nightcrawler to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive: there’s a loner protagonist, there are gorgeous panoramic shots of southern California, and there’s a lot of high-speed driving. But Lou Bloom isn’t an anti-hero; he’s an anti-person.

You feel sorry for the one person who seems to have been suckered in by Lou’s sales pitches, Rick, his employee/whipping boy, until you realize (too late) that Rick’s not as dumb as he looks. Riz Ahmed imbues Rick with an entirely believable “aw shucks” stoner quality far removed from the damaged Aaron he played in iLL Manors, which says a lot about Ahmed’s range.

And then there’s Nina (Rene Russo, in a killer performance), who we feel sorry for because it seems like she’s going to get destroyed by Lou’s machinations. But then again, she’s just as despicable as he is.

You could say that Lou is a lost soul but it’s doubtful that he even has one. He’s a cipher who came from nowhere and was well on his way to being nothing until he saw that car accident on the freeway. We don’t know anything about Lou’s past but it’s pretty clear that his soullessness will provide a lucrative future for him.

But who is Lou Bloom? He’s a monster, the kind that literally hides under your bed. With a camcorder. Nightcrawler is a genuinely unsettling film, a satire so dark it feels like it was dragged from the depths of a black hole. It’s something you should see, but afterwards you might want to shower with bleach.

Nightcrawler opens in theaters on October 31.