Blue-Collar Art Heist: Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind”
Kelly Reichardt turns the art heist inside out in “The Mastermind,” a blue-collar scramble that swaps slick capers for raw consequence and 1970s bite.
Kelly Reichardt has never been interested in the slick Hollywood version of history. Her new film The Mastermind throws viewers into a 1970s America where art theft isn’t glamorous—it’s desperate, clumsy, and often pathetic.
Instead of cat burglars and laser grids, Reichardt draws from real heists where small-town crooks simply grabbed Picassos and Rembrandts off the wall and ran. In her film, Josh O’Connor plays JB, a disillusioned art student who stumbles into a half-baked museum robbery. The job—stealing Arthur Dove works from a sleepy Massachusetts gallery—quickly unravels, pushing JB into a downward spiral across Nixon’s paranoid America.
The irony is sharp: the so-called “mastermind” is barely holding himself together. Reichardt uses his collapse to probe something bigger—the fading promise of postwar optimism, the conservative backlash to the ’60s, and the suffocating emptiness of suburban middle-class life. The I.M. Pei-designed library that stands in for the museum becomes a symbol of civic ambition, now haunted by disillusion.
The Mastermind screens at the New York Film Festival through October before hitting theaters on the 17th. It’s less a heist caper than a slow-motion crash of American dreams, caught in the grip of a country turning cold.
© ART Walkway 2025. All Rights Reserved.
