“For us to live any other way was nuts. To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers… If we wanted something, we just took it.” Above almost any other line in his nearly sixty-year career, this one from GoodFellas, spoken as narration from Henry Hill to the audience, is the one that solidified director Martin Scorsese’s unparalleled ability to understand a way of life, specifically that of organized crime. It’s what made people incorrectly assume that he glorifies that lifestyle, with its “live fast, die young” mentality full of excess and greed. Deep down inside all of us is probably a juvenile desire to be free of all the rules and restrictions that we’ve placed on ourselves. But whether it's morals or laws, we keep the course and tough it out. It’s why we’re jealous of criminals, as they get to live the lives we can’t… except for the parts about getting caught, killed, or ruining the lives of everyone who’s become entangled with such schemes.

Writer/director Kelly Reichardt is the type of filmmaker who loves to grasp onto those exceptions, twisting them into revelations that deconstruct what we’ve long assumed. Meek’s Cutoff is a female-centered western, Night Moves is an ecothriller stripped of a fast pace and righteous protagonists, and Showing Up displayed the untold pains that must be endured to create art, all without much expectation for reward. Inside all of these films are characters who want to escape their current situations, caught in a cycle of pre-established norms that prevent them from being their best selves.

James Blaine “JB” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is one of those characters, a failed architect who can’t bring himself to trudge through the basic life he’s built for himself. He has two boys with his wife, Terri (Alana Haim), and eats dinner with his disapproving parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis) each week. It’s all so boring, except for the moments he spends at the local art museum. Rob Mazurek’s upbeat, jazzy score illustrates the gears turning in JB’s brain, the sleeping guard and disregard for any other security measures convincing him that he can easily become Henry Hill and take whatever he wants. He concocts a plan to steal four valuable paintings, carefully recruiting his team and giving them instructions on how the heist will go. It’ll be so easy, with no one getting in the way or caring about what’s being taken.

JB certainly didn’t account for the “if it sounds too good to be true” part of the equation, which is how the whole thing falls apart and sends his life into a tailspin. It probably would have taken three “and then what?” questions from an outside party to see the many gaps in this master plan. To both Scorsese and Reichrdt, this examination of the Dunning-Kruger effect revolves around misplaced entitlement. In Scorsese’s eyes, it’s a tragic rise and fall from grace, littered with highs that convince the characters to withstand the lows. In Reichardt’s, the whole thing is just plain pathetic. The simplest description for the logic behind this criminal act is that a privileged man would rather steal from the public than do any amount of hard work for himself and his family.

Reichardt twists this knife even deeper by setting the story in 1970, the shadow of the Vietnam War looming large. The theme of choice is frequently touched upon. Some people, mostly the underprivileged, don’t have a choice about being drafted to serve in this unjust war. Others are choosing to protest, with flyers posted on every corner and demonstrations being broadcast each night on television. JB makes a snide remark about draft dodgers harboring in Canada, as if he shouldn’t have to stoop that low in his current on-the-run predicament. And yet it seems all these people chose to do something with their lives, or made the most of their inability to do so. JB chose to make things worse, and everyone else has to pay a price.

O’Connor’s incredible performance makes JB’s overall shittiness palatable. We don’t want him to fail, although everyone would probably be better off once he is caught. It’s the other half of the coin to his work in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, with his portrayal of preacher Jud Duplentis being about finding a higher purpose after being lost in the wilderness. In GoodFellas, Henry states that “your murderers come with smiles, they come as your friends, the people who've cared for you all of your life. And they always seem to come at a time that you're at your weakest and most in need of their help.” JB is one of those murderers, killing the image of the American dream at a time when it was most vulnerable, all with a smile and a masked spirit of innocence.