The Tom Hardy Mob Drama 'Capone' Takes a Tommy Gun to the Gangster Biopic

With his frog-like croak of a voice and his piles of old age make-up, Tom Hardy doesn't disappear into the role of aging Chicago crime boss Al Capone in Josh Trank's Capone so much as he attempts to bury himself alive. While some actors approach their roles like suave, discreet magicians, surprising the audience with subtle tweaks to a persona or clever adjustments to their appearance, Hardy prefers to announce the terms of his trick early and often. Whether he's talking concrete in a small-scale drama or chowing down on lobsters in a blockbuster, he always performs in bold letters. In filmmaker Trank's occasionally gripping, often ponderous gangster character study Capone (which is now available for purchase or rental on VOD, following a lengthy development process), that means we meet a paranoid, sickly protagonist in the grips of mania.

At the very least, emphasizing all the unseemly physical details — the way a drool-covered cigar dangles from his mouth, the hack of his cough as he spits in a bucket, and the stench of piss emanating from his freshly soiled pajama pants — gives the actor a chance to put his stamp on a character nearly as integral (and familiar) to the evolution of the movies as James Bond. Stumbling and slurring his words with Brando-like flair, Hardy knows he's playing with mob history here. Form Paul Muni's Antonio "Tony" Camonte in 1932's Scarface to Robert de Niro's baseball-bat wielding crime boss in 1987's The Untouchables, Capone's disfigured visage is as essential to the gangster genre as the tommy gun or the fedora. His mythology helped define the clichés.

Presented as a knowing counter-narrative, Capone is well aware of its main character's cartoon-like image in popular culture. In choosing to only focus on what the opening text on screen refers to as "the final year of his life," the movie zeroes in on a less widely known aspect of the screen villain's story and attempts to carve out its own slice of history, one that culminates with the antihero wielding a golden machine gun and wearing a diaper. Introduced in a horror-tinged opening sequence that ends with him chasing children down a hallway like a doddering grandpa, the movie's version of Capone is constantly toying with the expectations the viewer brings to a conventional mob story. He even goes by a different name: Fonzo, which was the original title for the project. 

As played by Hardy, Fonzo listens to radio plays dramatizing the violent exploits of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, shouts at the gardeners on his vast Florida estate, and occasionally mumbles about a $10 million dollar fortune he may have buried somewhere on the swamp-like property. His wife Mae (Linda Cardellini) cares for him, his son Junior (Noel Fisher) yearns for his approval, and his old buddy Johnny (Matt Dillon) takes him out for the occasional fishing trip to get away from the FBI agents circling the house with cameras, binoculars, and recording equipment. He's essentially living under quarantine.

In its more effective first half, Capone, which was shot by frequent David Lynch collaborator Peter Deming, strikes a pleasingly hazy tone of menace and dark humor. While Capone wants to hold onto what he's got, to preserve his fading sense of control and slipping hint of dignity, he's simply too cruel, child-like, and petty to let the people who care for him help. He moves between dreams and reality like Tony Soprano, but Trank's script is a bit too plot-obsessed, seeding ideas like the buried money and a secret son in Cleveland calling to make contact with his father, to really feel like it's exploring the outer realms of a criminal's unconscious.

What would the inside of a dying gangster's mind look like? Martin Scorsese's The Irishman attempted to answer the question last year, serving up a pageant of bloodshed and regret with spiritual rigor, but Capone has its own guilt-ridden ideas about death and decay. Unfortunately, the imagery — balloons floating in the air, blood spurting from necks, a man crawling through a street strewn with bodies — rarely pops with the correct Lynchian mix of the mundane and the surreal. (It is fun to see Kyle Maclachlan drop in as Fonzo's compromised doctor.) You wish the movie would linger in a contemplative mood more often, perhaps risking the boredom that often accompanies genuine dread, instead of barreling ahead to the next reveal.

Ultimately, Capone ends up feeling less like a deeply personal passion project and more like a cleverly calibrated "flip" of a popular figure from American history. It makes sense that Trank, following up his inventive found-footage breakthrough Chronicle and the unremarkable superhero flop Fantastic Four, would reach for such mythologically potent source material. The movie treats Capone as a comic-book figure to be remixed and re-contextualized for a new generation, putting him in conversation with the lion from The Wizard of Oz and countless other reference points. It doesn't necessarily dig deep, and it never quite locates the treasure hinted at in its best moments, but there are bizarre joys to be found on the surface.

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