In “The Alto Knights,” Robert De Niro Sings a Familiar Gangland Tune
How might a mid-century New York City Mob boss spend his nights? Frank Costello, the acting head of the Luciano crime family, prefers to stay in, with his wife and their two adorable dogs. No guns and no molls, except the ones that pop up on TV, in a trailer for the 1949 gangster classic “White Heat,” starring a viciously leering James Cagney. (“It’s your kind of Cagney . . . in his kind of story.”) Vito Genovese, Frank’s sometime friend and longtime rival, is having a more eventful evening, overseeing the murder of his wife’s ex-husband. The violence is compounded by a redundant frenzy of crosscutting, double-underlining the difference between Frank, a man of domestic leisure, and Vito, a jealous and vengeful killer. The contrast is already night and day — or, rather, heads and tails. Both Frank and Vito, you see, are played by Robert De Niro.
This is the odd gimmick of Barry Levinson’s biographical drama “The Alto Knights,” his first feature in a decade. After working with De Niro in “Sleepers” (1996), “Wag the Dog” (1997), “What Just Happened” (2008), and the Bernie Madoff telefilm “The Wizard of Lies” (2017), Levinson has now cast him in a blood-spattered Mafia history lesson, unfolding in a wing somewhere adjacent to the director’s 1991 film, “Bugsy,” where Frank and Vito popped up in brief, surly cameos. The tribal codes and brutish hierarchies of Italian American Mob rule are well-trodden screen turf for De Niro; who’s to say whether he might ever tire of donning a fedora, sitting in vintage automobiles, or dropping jocular anecdotes and staccato expletives? It’s your kind of De Niro, in his kind of story, but with a high-concept twist.
Such novelty seems a must these days for a crime-movie subgenre so susceptible to cliché. When De Niro played the hit man Frank Sheeran in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” (2019), he was subjected to a battery of digital de-aging techniques; the distortions were distracting, but the performance was indelible and seemed, perhaps, to strike a note of finality. When your résumé includes a murderers’ row — the young Vito Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II” (1974), Al Capone in “The Untouchables” (1987), and Jimmy Conway in “Goodfellas” (1990), for starters — how much farther can you go without veering into overkill? De Niro was already courting accusations of self-parody in 1999, when he starred in the comedy “Analyze This,” riffing on his own greatest hits as a mobster in need of therapy — a proto-Tony Soprano.
But speaking of sopranos and, now, altos: De Niro may be singing a familiar tune in his latest roles, yet he also attempts, and largely achieves, a tricky two-part harmony. His double casting is an impressive stunt, somehow both meaningless and mesmerizing. As Frank, De Niro is all genial shrugs and winces, chattering in a recognizable lower register and grinning his classic jowly grin. As Vito, glaring from behind dark sunglasses, he looks ratty, distant, and tightly wound; even his skin seems pulled tauter. His voice jumps nearly an octave, approaching the tessitura of Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas,” and with a hair-trigger temper to match.
The film begins with a jolt of violence, then rewinds to the beginning: so far, so “Goodfellas.” (Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote that Scorsese classic, is also the screenwriter here.) It’s 1957 when Frank, returning to his Central Park West penthouse, is shot by an assailant, Vincent Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis), on Vito’s cold-blooded orders. Frank survives, though he possibly wishes he hadn’t; he appears beleaguered, and singularly uninterested in retaliation. As a Mob war looms, the long, tangled arc of Frank and Vito’s friendship comes into truncated semi-focus, in a jumble of old photographs, big-band tunes, and scraps of voice-over. At times, an older Frank — like the aged Sheeran in “The Irishman” — addresses the camera directly, as if he were being interviewed, but Levinson doesn’t commit to the device with anything approaching Scorsese’s rigor, or his mastery of the rapid-fire digression.
And so we learn only in passing about the boys’ turn-of-the-century New York upbringing; their days at the Alto Knights Social Club, a hub of gangster activity; and their early entry into the forces of the Sicilian mafioso Lucky Luciano. Then came Prohibition and bootlegging, which catapulted them into new spheres of social and political influence. Frank ascended to the top of the Luciano power structure in the nineteen-thirties, after Vito, his predecessor, fled the country to avoid a double-homicide rap. Vito got stuck in Italy during the Second World War, leaving Frank and the operation to thrive without him. Now, after more than a decade of relative peace and prosperity, of paid-off cops and flourishing casinos, Vito is back and bent on regaining control — even if, as made clear by that opening gunshot, he has to eliminate his best friend to do it.
There are many fascinating tales tucked away amid this buildup, but “The Alto Knights” is too hurried to unpack them; it settles for spraying chunks of them at the screen, like so much expository buckshot, before rushing back to the spectacle of its duelling De Niros. Coming from the Barry Levinson who gave us films like “Diner” (1982), “Avalon” (1990), and “Liberty Heights” (1999) — a storyteller well attuned to the complexities of immigrant assimilation and boyhood friendship — it feels like a curious misdirection of talent.
It has taken more than fifty years for “The Alto Knights” — or “Wise Guys,” as it was known during its time in development hell — to make it to the screen. The ninety-two-year-old Hollywood veteran Irwin Winkler, one of the film’s credited producers, was in his mid-forties when he acquired the rights to “Frank Costello, Prime Minister of the Underworld,” a book co-written by George Wolf, Costello’s trusted lawyer. That was in 1974, not long after Costello died, of natural causes, at the age of eighty-two; it was also around the time that “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II” were reshaping the American gangster movie forever.
Here it may be worth noting, just in case De Niro’s casting didn’t already supply enough of a meta-wrinkle, that Costello was a crucial model for Vito Corleone — a connection that becomes clearer as “The Alto Knights” settles into a workmanlike groove. Frank, like Corleone, is presented as the most reluctant of killers; he shuns drug dealing, prefers diplomacy to violence, and sees himself as a professional gambler and philanthropist, not a racketeer. By contrast, Vito — Genovese, that is, not Corleone — pushes drugs aggressively, resorts to violence early and often, and scoffs at any pretensions of legitimacy, especially given the legalized thuggery of the politicians with whom Frank has curried favor. (“They own this fucking country,” Vito spits. “They’re bigger gangsters than we ever could be.”) Vito is a monster, but he’s also the more honest crook.
The movie spends a lot of time driving home these differences. Frank adores his wife of nearly four decades, Bobbie (Debra Messing), and her frowning and chiding affirm that the love is mutual; Vito weds an Italian American night-club owner, Anna (a terrific Kathrine Narducci), and she comes to loathe him and his greed with a fiery gusto. Sometime later, forced to testify before a Senate committee investigating interstate-commerce crimes, Vito and his cronies plead the Fifth; Frank, eager to flaunt his respectability, proves far looser-lipped — a mistake he will pay for with prison time.
Many of these episodes, although part of the historical record, have been embellished, streamlined, and reshuffled for the sake of narrative flow. (The boldest change: Genovese actually rubbed out his wife’s ex in 1932, a full seventeen years before the release of “White Heat.”) Departing from the facts is, of course, no crime; what undoes “The Alto Knights” is its hectic insistence on its own authenticity. The jittery editing exudes more anxiety than it does pulp energy, and nary a scene goes by that hasn’t been needlessly goosed with banner headlines and popping flashbulbs. Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power — by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself. Vito, seething and remorseless, grabs at control relentlessly; Frank, in no mood to fight, tries to cede it graciously, resulting in a lopsided tug-of-war. You nod in furious agreement when Frank’s closest ally, Albert Anastasia (Michael Rispoli, fierce but bighearted), insists on swift retribution against Vito for making a move against a big boss. And you chuckle grimly when, in 1957, Mafia bosses gather for a historic summit in Apalachin, New York, and Frank, in a perfectly calculated show of deference, maintains the stealthiest of upper hands.
Levinson, who can find warmth and humor in most circumstances, is naturally drawn toward Frank’s gentility. If the film feels a little juiceless as a result, its restraint seems of a piece with Frank’s own caution. Unfair as it would be to compare “The Alto Knights” to “The Irishman,” some of Scorsese’s mournful grandeur — the mounting sense of futility, the bitter awareness of time’s passage — does cling to Levinson’s film by association. In both films, it’s De Niro’s Frankness that keeps you watching. Just when you think you’re out, he pulls you back in. ♦