In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is often in his boxers. The film begins with an extended opening credits sequence in which a neatly and fully-dressed James — otherwise known as J.B. — deftly sizes up the Framingham Art Museum while his wife Terri (Alana Haim) watches over their rambunctious boys (Jasper and Sterling Thompson). He slips a Revolutionary War figurine into a sunglasses case, and together they walk out the museum’s front door. Daring jazz music by Rob Mazurek punctuates the frames while modernist title cards stack vertically and glide up the screen. It initially appears to be a classic art heist: husband and wife in cahoots, together.

But appearances can be deceiving, and The Mastermind’s façade quickly slips away─if you’ve seen a Reichardt film before, you might know her Altmanesque knack for subverting genre. Her Westerns are anti-Western (First Cow, Meek’s Cutoff), her men-on-the-road movie dwells on stagnation (Old Joy), and this ‘70s era “crime drama” is no different. Almost immediately, J.B. — suave in the opening sequence — is revealed as inept and adrift. Bare-chested and jobless, he spends his mornings idling around the house while a quiet and sharply put-together Terri shepherds the boys off to school before making her own way to work in her green Volkswagen Bug. Reichardt’s work, after all, is concerned with mobility or lack thereof, with what ordinary people, under ordinary circumstances, do to get by.

Endowed with more material means than several of Reichardt’s other protagonists, J.B. is the son of well-regarded townspeople in a quaint Massachusetts suburb located halfway between Boston and Worcester. It’s the dawn of the 1970s: the television in the background of a home that I can’t quite tell whether belongs to him or his parents hums with murmurs of “powerlessness, cynicism, [and] apathy,” signalling the collective mood preceding the denouement of the Vietnam war. As a former art history student and sometimes carpenter who barely cloaks himself under the guise of aspiring to be an architect — he speaks this ambition only to his mother (Hope Davis), in the hope that she will give him cash to fund his real mission — J.B. has hardly amassed any of his own wealth or ambition. Though he’s scheming, his limits are within arm’s reach.

Where J.B. sets his sights is on a quartet of Arthur Dove paintings: Willow Tree (1937), Yellow Blue Green Brown (1941), Tree Forms (1932), and Tanks & Snowbanks (1938). He recruits a couple men to his basement operation and hatches a plan for them to put L’eggs pantyhose over their heads and rob the joint in broad daylight. In the first half of the film, the thing happens (but not without a hitch); in the second, an unfurling unfolds. Reichardt is more concerned with what transpires next for a man who has made a decision to unspool his life than with the flashy mechanics of plot. Without judgment, she observes.

As the film progresses and J.B. finds himself on the run, his character slowly shades in with colour, with Reichardt maintaining a delicate dance of what aspects of his personhood are revealed, and when. We learn little tidbits about his history through an encounter with old friends Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gabby Hoffman): Maude claims that J.B. felt a personal connection with Dove’s work dating back to their days in academia, suggesting his guilt. 

Though J.B.’s true motivations aren’t ever fully revealed — Reichardt’s filmmaking conserves space for us viewers to Rorschach our own ideas onto him — some clues reside in her use of Dove. Known as America’s first abstract painter, Dove described his own craft as “extraction”: locating his métier in taking pure forms from the natural world to portray them on his canvas. He earned money at various times in his career as an illustrator, but proved too ambivalent about commerce and commercialisation to stick with that, opting instead to move further into nature and freeze time in paint.

The only time I sense J.B. moved by something greater than his own being comes when he admires those abstract paintings. It does not feel like a coincidence that J.B.’s true skill lives in his physical handiwork: the wooden case he constructs to house the stolen works.

Like an artifact of the time J.B. lived in, the visual language of Reichardt’s film is rich with softness: it looks like an old grainy print coloured with muted autumnal hues of brown and orange. Massachusetts is lived in and fuzzy. As J.B. isolates himself, abstracting further into a life between towns in America’s heartland, subtle, thoughtful reminders permeate the frame, signposting that nothing in this life is free, no choice without consequence: towards the end of the film, a parking lot in Ohio alerts would-be patrons that you must pay to park. Here, the work of Reichardt’s longtime cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, evokes the banal subjects of American photographer Stephen Shore, but darker.

Though a film necessarily extends across time, watching The Mastermind mimics viewing a great static work of visual art. Looking back on the film, there are two particular combinations of images and words that are etched in my mind: first, a slow and enrapturing scene featuring that wooden case and a barn, where I want to believe that J.B.’s salvation could be within sight; and second, the crumpled curve of a getaway-guy’s upper lip. Jerry the Driver (Matthew Maher) imparts upon J.B. the too-late wisdom to “never work with drug addicts, dealers, or wild cards.” At this point however, J.B. is already in too deep, burrowing too far into real outcast status as he severs away from his family, conventional forms of occupation, and the hopes for America’s future we see in glimpses of protest. It comes into focus that, if you look closely enough, everything has been visible from the start.