To paraphrase the old-school comedian Rodney Dangerfield, a pickpocket in 2020s New York gets no respect. Almost no one carries much cash anymore, and credit cards are useless unless you’re willing to commit fraud. What’s a poor guy with crackerjack observational skills and exceedingly dexterous fingers supposed to do when he can’t even pay for his diner breakfast with his morning’s earnings?
That’s where John Turturro’s Harry Lehman finds himself in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, writer-director Noah Segan’s charming, nimble, and affecting drama about a guy who has seen his city, and his world, change drastically during his lifetime. For Harry, a typical workday involves boarding the subway and identifying the easy targets. In his soft, elegant tweed coat—a garment he might have bought 20 or 30 years ago, maybe at Barneys, when the dough was really flowing—he swirls through New York, his vision attuned to checked-out, earbud-wearing Wall Street dudes, or women who allow their purses to dangle precariously. He sees what others miss, though he’s living in a world where no one pays any attention to their environment. It’s a lonely life.
But there’s a bright spot in Harry’s world: Though his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), has been stricken with an unnamed ailment and can neither move nor speak, his days revolve around her. He cares for her tenderly, as best he can, talking to her, laughing with her. At one point he puts Odyssey’s 1977 sequins-and-stardust disco hit “Native New Yorker” on the stereo and dances for both of them, in a kind of disco-salsa shuffle, his arms whirling as if the breeze itself were his dance partner.
Rosie’s care costs money, which means Harry needs to hustle harder than ever. Watches can still bring in the bucks, as long as they’re not fake. And to unload those, Harry has a close pal and longtime co-conspirator, the wily, wisecracking pawnshop owner Ben (Steve Buscemi). Ben will also take stolen phones, though they’re troublesome: they need to go to a guy in Chinatown, Kelvin Han Yee’s Frank, who knows how to scrub them, after which they’re packed into a container and shipped off to god knows where. When Harry boosts a USB crypto wallet from a brazen young criminal and spoiled rich kid, Dylan (Will Price), Ben has no idea what to do with it—plugging it into his circa-1995 desktop personal computer sends the machine into a tailspin. So he sends Harry downtown to see Frank—whose front is a herb shop, though it seems less like a front than a side hustle—and that’s where Harry’s troubles really begin.
The Only Living Pickpocket is part drama, part comedy, part thriller. It’s also a movie about a man reckoning with his past: We may warm to the sight of Harry caring so lovingly for Rosie, but there’s much more to his story, as we learn. And you can’t always tell where the movie is headed; its beats are wriggly, unpredictable. Until recently, writer-director Segan has worked mostly as an actor, often with director Rian Johnson (he appeared in Brick, Looper, and the Knives Out movies), and he has directed one previous feature, the 2022 horror movie Blood Relatives. The pickpocketty lightness of touch he shows is remarkable for a fledgling director.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s got Turturro as a star. In the early part of his career, as a favorite of Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers, Turturro, with his tightly coiled, jack-in-the-box energy, always looked like he might blow at any moment. But he’s become much subtler, and sexier, over the years. in the underappreciated 2013 comedy Fading Gigolo, which he also wrote and directed, he played a foxy florist who becomes a classy male escort, servicing sultry hotties (Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara) before falling for a lonely Hasidic widow (Vanessa Paradis). Suddenly, he was a leading man, and a hot one.
Turturro still has some of his old combustibility; you occasionally catch an air of menace behind that snaggle-tooth smile. But he now has more softness, more range, and the performance he gives in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is one of his finest, as well as one of the best of the year. In the first section of the film, you believe Harry is just a guy whose glory days have passed: He belongs to a dream New York, that of the 1970s and ‘80s, of strobe-lit dance clubs and independent cinemas seemingly on every block. (Cinematographer Sam Levy, who also shot Frances Ha and Lady Bird, is in tune with the old New York nestled within the current one; he captures the city, from the Bronx to Chinatown, in all its shabby-shiny glory.) At one point, Harry suggests to Rosie that the two hunker down for the evening and watch an old movie, maybe something with Barbara Stanwyck; he comes from a generation that was used to looking toward its past as well as its future.
The city wasn’t a safe place in Harry’s younger days—but we’re talking about something other than physical safety, a kind of creative vitality that, if you were attuned to it, could rub off on you like glitter. Harry still has some of that sparkle, but it’s tempered by melancholy, the aftermath of little mistakes and big ones he’s made along the way. Turturro captures all of it—and shows how Harry intends to do right by those he’s harmed—with the kind of lived-in ease you earn, if you’re lucky, over the course of a career. Whirling through the city in that tweed coat, he’s like Fred Astaire breezing through an obviously fake white-cardboard Venice or descending a staircase from nowhere. The grit of the city is his glamour, its noise his music. It’s all his for a song, or a watch deftly separated from its owner’s wrist. His city is a tough place and, as Odyssey sang, he should know the score by now. But at least he knows the dance steps, because as much as New York may change, those never do.
