‘Who’s laughing last? The world we live in’: Kelly Reichardt unpacks ‘The Mastermind’

Like all Kelly Reichardt anti-heroes, James ‘JB’ Mooney (Josh O’Connor) from The Mastermind is high on his own supply. Set in 1970s America, The Mastermind follows JB, an unremarkable and barely employed carpenter, imagining himself as a tasteful art thief. JB attempts a heist in such a slapdash manner that it belies his self-mythologising.

Co-starring Alana Haim, Hope Davis, John Magaro and Gaby Hoffman, The Mastermind competed for the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and is now being streamed on MUBI.

Featuring an upbeat jazzy score from Robert Mazurek, Reichardt’s heist film is unusually snappy, compared to her slow-cinema work.

“I generally tell stories of individuals without any say or power, but James is White, middle-class and handsome,” Reichardt told Scroll. “That way, this film may seem like a left turn. I am trying to look at how James’s privilege blinds him, how his resentment towards his comfort and the desire to leave it behind contradicts his reliance on it, and the women in his life. He believes he can be a child and others will pick up the slack.”

James is not unlike the blustering but clueless protagonist of Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2013), the middle-aged hippie hero of Old Joy (2006) and the ecoterrorists of Night Moves (2013). They are frustrated individuals denying their ordinariness, posing as heroic American individualists. The films are also idiosyncratic subversions of templatised American genres: Meek’s Cutoff, the Western, or Old Joy, the road movie.

“The footprint of all American genres lies with the White man’s point of view,” the 61-year-old director explained. “As much as being clustered with other women as a female filmmaker makes me want to vomit, it’s also a generational matter. I am not seeing the world like John Ford. I am more interested in the person standing behind John Wayne.”

Reichardt’s incisive exploration of lonely men and their self-regard that brings them to the verge of neurosis brings to mind writer-director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, First Reformed). Reichardt has previously spoken highly of Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978), also a heist film featuring thieves in over their heads, the world humbling them.

“I love how Paul dealt with small-scale political grouses, which are high stakes to the protagonists, but low stakes to the bigger world, how he mixed it up with comedy and silliness, and yet managing to never lose the feeling of weight of the heavier topics,” Reichardt explained. “What scared me the most – and why bother making a film if it’s not scaring you – is that there were so many different tones in The Mastermind. A lot of that is in Blue Collar.”

Reichardt’s compassionate but also twinkly-eyed look at men begs the question: does she find men funny? She credits a large part of her characterisations to the humour of novelist Jonathan Raymond, her co-writer on six films.

“The most overt of this humour is possibly in First Cow, where the loud and aggressive fur trappers see themselves as tough guys, but I saw them as muppets,” Reichardt said. “Just the ridiculousness of their masculinity was funny. I mean who’s laughing last? The world we live in. And yet, the most ridiculous masculine forces still control the universe. They are easy to poke fun at, for sure.”

A seminal American independent filmmaker, Reichardt made her feature debut at 30 with River of Grass. She had to wait more than a decade to find financing for her second film. It wasn’t until she found kinship with the actor Michelle Williams, with whom she has made four films, that her career gained momentum.

Her advice to indie filmmakers in 2025?

“Keep working, keep learning, keep watching films,” Reichardt said. “I used to live in New York City. If I could afford to go watch a movie, I would. I would constantly see films from the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, world cinema, not popular films, so I could educate myself. I kept reading, kept practising with a Super 8 camera. I learned editing by myself. I learned what different lenses do, hoping I will get the chance to make a film someday. And I saved all my nickels from my job, with which I made Old Joy.”