“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” starts off with bang – the plaintive tones of James Murphy crooning out LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” It’s an apt sentiment for writer/director Noah Segan’s new film, but he wrongfoots us in those first few moments. We watch as a businessman (played by John Gallagher Jr.) – your typical ill-fitting suit, martinis-at-lunch type of guy –readies himself for work.
And maybe, for a second, we think the song is about this man as he zombie-walks his way through his sad little money-making life. But then, we catch a glimpse of the guy behind him on the subway – the pickpocket, Harry (John Turturro), who will slip the businessman’s wallet out of his jacket pocket, making it impossible for him to pay for those martinis at lunch. The song is not about the businessman, but rather he is the cause of the singer’s malaise. The businessman is the guy bringing guys like Harry down – changing the New York he once loved to something else entirely.
That sense of nostalgia for a world long past permeates Segan’s film, imbues it with an aching sort of melancholy that’s wrapped up in Turturro’s quietly staggering performance of a guy watching the world move on without him. It’s a staple of the aging actor’s career to take on a role that reckons with their age and with their place in the world – and this feels like Turturro’s “The Old Man and the Gun.” Segan’s script offers him a rich, thrilling world in which to play with themes of regret and the ever-changing tapestry of New York City.
Harry is a pickpocket (the only living one in the city, you might say), and spends his days looking for a score. He takes whatever he deems valuable to his friend Ben (Steve Buscemi), who owns a pawn shop, and then heads home to care for his ailing wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave), who is wheelchair bound and mute. One evening, he picks the wrong mark – Dylan (Will Price), a young, rich, as*hole – and ends up with a crypto wallet worth millions of dollars.
Harry is a luddite (“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is an excellent “old man yells at computer” movie), and sells off the USB drive, completely ignorant of its value. But Dylan, despite being utterly ridiculous, comes from the type of family you don’t want to mess with. He finds Harry, sending him on a journey across the boroughs to find the drive – or else.
In many ways, “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is your quintessential generational divide movie, hinging on the age-old fight of analog versus digital. Harry ribs Ben’s daughter, Eve (Victoria Moroles) about her hacking prowess, preferring to forgo computers for the good-old “five-finger discount,” as he puts it. In one scene, Dylan picks a fight with a bartender because he thinks his drink is bad, and assumes the bartender made it wrong. But it quickly becomes clear that Dylan has never had the drink before – he ordered it because it’s popular on TikTok. When the bartender looks at him incredulously, Dylan says, indignantly: “So you think that 9 million posts are wrong?”
But, while another movie might have taken this argument to a cartoonish extent, “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is neither didactic nor one-dimensional in its ideas about tech. Dylan, silly as he is, quite easily finds Harry’s home through a series of security cameras and GPS tech. Harry’s distaste for the younger generation’s reliance on technology and his good-natured grumblings about the exorbitant cost of Yoo-hoos nowadays are understandable (and delightfully charming, delivered in Turturro’s thick New York brogue). But his dislike is pushed up against a simmering sense of inevitability – the old world, his world, is dying, whether he likes it or not. And he better get right with it while he can.
Segan paints each New York neighborhood as a world all its own, Sam Levy’s cinematography almost gentle as the camera finds the unique soul of each street corner. Harry’s trek across the world leads him to confront a couple of old ghosts, like a detective he knew back in the day (Giancarlo Esposito) and his estranged daughter, Kelly (Tatiana Maslany), who wants nothing to do with him.
Watching Harry meet these figures – whether it be an old pickpocket and a cop reminiscing about their old days on opposite sides of the law, or a daughter determined not to show her father how much he has hurt her – it’s impossible not to think about Turturro’s career. In his earlier film roles, he’d often play complete scumbags – guys you’d take one look at and immediately feel contempt for. That anger, that sense of scuttering mania, still rears its head from time to time, particularly as Harry’s deadline looms closer. But, right before all hell breaks loose, there’s a moment where he sits down to shine his shoes in he and Rosie’s apartment, pontificating about what they’ll do together when he gets home that evening – they’ll eat dinner, and maybe he’ll pick up a Barbara Stanwyck movie from the library on the way home. In this moment, Turturro paints a portrait of a man whose unbridled energy, whose selfishness and rage, has settled down into something far more tender and loving. And in a multitude of these tender moments across “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” he finds a note that’s almost eviscerating in its warmth.
But, for Harry, his mad grasp at goodness might be too late. Being left behind by the world has given Harry time to think about his regrets, time to think about the guilt and pain he’s spent the latter part of his life trying to atone for. He is a man stuck in time in a world that’s changing too fast – but maybe the changing world isn’t the problem. Maybe all it does is allow you to see more clearly your faults and, hopefully, how to find peace in them.
