Notes from Tribeca: The Wannabe (2015)

I saw this upcoming feature film at Tribeca FF on Friday April 17. I'm not sure when it will be released, but it's worth looking for. Keep an eye out.

The Wannabe takes place in 1992 at the time of the federal trial of John “Dapper Don” Gotti - the previously teflon-coated godfather of the Gambini crime family. Gotti, notwithstanding his vicious history and profession, was something of a folk hero in his Queens neighborhood, and the movie starts with a block party in his honor taking place during the early days of the trial. Thomas (Vincent Piazza) isn’t from the neighborhood, and is certainly no mobster, but he is a huge Gotti fan and a nut for gangster movies like the Cagney classics from the thirties and the Coppola Godfather series  – so much so that he has  modeled his whole persona on those characters: he walks, talks, and acts as though he’s one of those guys. He’s a nobody, but wants to be a somebody. His fondest wish is to ingratiate himself with Gotti; and he has a plan .

So he shows up at the block party in a white suit, silk tie, pocket hankie, hair slicked back, tough guy leer on his face, in the hope of making an impression. While there, he catches the eye of Rose (Patricia Arquette), a neighborhood girl at least ten years his senior. Rose is on the make too, for some excitement and for some one to take her out of her humdrum life. They hook up. Though not as crazy as Thomas, Rose is intoxicated by his bravado and soon is sucked into his wacky fantasies.

Arquette channels Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker, gangster moll and a cross between mommy and Lady MacBeth to her man. Piazza’s Thomas is sort of cinephile in the mold of Belmondo's character Michel in Breathless, crossed with De Niro's obsessive celebrity wannabe Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, a guy who has so immersed himself in Hollywood's tough guy mobster archetype, that he forgets these guys are fictional. Michael Corleone and John Gotti are equally real to him, and somehow noble in his mind.
                                                                                                                                                                    The Wannabe  is loosely based on a true story. Writer/director Nick Sandow, best known for playing Officer Capputo on Orange Is The New Black,  clearly has a strong affection for this material and the milieu.   Piazza is dazzling as Thomas, the rest of the cast is strong, the story – by turns funny and tragic – works, and the result is a pretty terrific movie.