In an era when any significant pop-culture event yields competing insta-docs on multiple streaming services, there’s something almost quaint about a good old-fashioned reenactment feature. A filmmaker can really stretch their legs when freed from the cycle of witness, journalist, color commenter, rinse, repeat.
For the first hour of The Luckiest Man in America, director Samir Oliveros — who wrote the screenplay with Maggie Briggs — makes good use of that creative freedom in telling the story of Michael Larson. We’re not sure quite what to make of Larson, played by Paul Walter Hauser as an unkempt and jittery but seemingly good-hearted family man who drives his ice cream truck to L.A. for a chance to compete on the game show Press Your Luck in 1984.
Director of photography Pablo Lozano situates Larson in a grainy, color-saturated carnival hellscape. If Dario Argento had become a CBS journeyman, daytime TV might have looked like this. The idea seems to be to put us inside the mind of Larson, haunted by streak-ending “whammies” (including one in a full mascot suit) and taunted by the casino-like illuminated game board.
The script is somewhat kinder than the cinematography to the Press Your Luck producers, who are portrayed as cynical but not sinister. We follow the tension in a weirdly spacious control room as the showrunners watch Larson hit a hot streak like none other, and debate what they might be able to do to break his run before he bankrupts the network.
The key source of tension, which Oliveros and Briggs would have done well to ratchet upward rather than largely abandon in the third act, is that while Larson is clearly up to something, he’s not actually breaking any of the game’s stated rules. The movie loses momentum when it leaves the studio confines and sends a producer (Shamier Anderson) off on an implausibly fruitful mission to learn Larson’s backstory.
The lost momentum is particularly noticeable given that Larson’s lucky streak unfolds in near-realtime, over a series of episodes filmed back to back. There are nods to tension with Larson’s two competitors (Brian Geraghty and Patti Harrison), as well as with a too-forgiving production assistant (Maisie Williams), but ultimately The Luckiest Man in America turns more on a reveal of Larson’s character than of the game outcome.
That’s a worthy feat for the film to attempt, but if the in-show and extra-show tension had been more tightly interwoven, The Luckiest Man in America might have held us on the edges of our seats. Instead, the movie sends Larson on a surreal, puzzling walkabout that leaves us without the context we need to entirely buy the conclusion’s sympathetic turn.
For all this movie’s missed opportunities, The Luckiest Man in America remains a watchable, often engaging movie about a guy who decided to make his own luck. One way or another, everyone has to to hit a whammy sometime.
Images courtesy IFC Films. The Luckiest Man in America is an IFC Films release.
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