Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal dropped twenty pounds to play Lou Bloom, whose creepy Horatio Alger story is told in "Nightcrawler." His narrower frame gives him a cadaver-like appearance: gaunt with piercing eyes, sunken cheeks and greasy, long hair that in moments of stress, he ties up in a bun. He looks like the walking dead, but Bloom's a wily zombie: a self-starter, he's somehow landed in Los Angeles with no history and skills except those of a petty thief.

Early on when he sells some stolen construction equipment to a site manager, he makes a pitch for a job using jargon he's learned from some self-help website. "Who am I?" he asks. "I'm a hard worker. I set high goals and I've been told that I'm persistent. My motto is if you want to win the lottery, you have to earn the money to buy a ticket. So what do you say? I can start tomorrow, even, why not tonight." The man turns him down for obvious reasons: he's a thief, to which Bloom flashes a knowing smile that suggests he knows not to bullshit a bullshitter.

A bit later Bloom confesses he's learned everything he knows from the Internet. He even talks like a computer, speaking in a rehearsed monotone that barely hides the contempt he has for the world underneath. If this were another kind of movie, he could easily be an alien sent to Earth to awkwardly impersonate a human being; but in Don Gilroy's terrific first feature, he's a marginal personality with a sketchy charisma; and he centers this perversely funny satire on the media and the public's insatiable appetite for sensation, be it on television and at the movies.

Lou Bloom's a creep, but we're easily drawn into his world; rooting for him despite the fact we know he's a sociopath. This gives this pretty far-fetched story an ambivalent subtext and believability in spite of its often incredulous plot. Gilroy all but begs the audience to find the holes in his story line (he wrote the script as well as directed), but this seems beside the point. "Nightcrawler" is a thrilling cinematic fable; not unlike "Drive" in its depiction of an anti-social hero, fatalistic plotting and cool vision of Los Angeles in the overnight hours, here given the hard-edge of digital photography largely viewed from Bloom's moving car and through his camera lens.

Bloom finds his career when he comes across an automobile accident on the freeway; he stops and is fascinated by the way a pair of cameramen videotape the burning car as the victim is pulled from it. He learns they're nightcrawlers - professional cameramen that attempt to video accidents and crime scenes to peddle to local television outlets. One of them, the veteran Joe Loder (a hard-edged Bill Paxton), gives Bloom a few tips of how to get started. Soon enough Bloom has a cheap video camera and old school police scanner, and hits the streets in pursuit of the kind of sensational footage that will get him on television.

His brashness leads him to scoop Loder on filming the shooting victim of a carjacking. He all but captures the dying man in close-up, which is footage that Nina (steely Rene Russo), an enterprising television news producer on a failing station, grabs for the lead on her early morning broadcast. She also gives him advice about equipment and the kind of story that will sell - the best being one that features "a screaming woman, running down the street, with her throat cut."

The obsequious Bloom eats this up, as well as her promise that she will buy his footage that meets her criteria. Within days he has hired an assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed, excellent), who works for $30 a night to chase down stories. The sweet, desperate Rick takes Bloom's verbal abuse, along with his mantras about teamwork and success, with a mute skepticism; but Bloom's talents literally bloom and within months he's driving a red sports car outfitted with the latest technology. He also extorts Nina into becoming his mistress in a darkly funny seduction scene in a Mexican restaurant. Suffice to say Bloom isn't changed by his new-found success; he's just a dork in a fancy car with a video camera living his version of the American dream.

His big break (this is, after all, a show biz story) comes when he beats the police to the scene of a bloody triple murder in the Valley and wanders through the murder house filming the crime scene, which the rating-conscious (its "Sweeps Week") Nina desperately needs. This sequence is the central point in the movie, reminiscent of classic ones that Hitchcock and DePalma did so well. The camera follows Bloom as he moves through the house methodically filming the blood on the white carpet, the disruption to the immaculate, upscale environment and, most disturbingly, the bloody bodies; and it has a hypnotic pull that underscores Gilroy's central point: that there's a complicity between the audience - be it watching the morning news or the latest Hollywood thriller - that wants to see the mayhem.

Bloom also films the two murderers as they escape - footage he chooses to hold from the police for his own ends, which leads to its thrilling climax: a chase across a downscaled LA neighborhood at 80 mph. Shot using digital cameras, these scenes have a crisp, hard sheen (I can't wait to see the film in IMAX) and end the film on a surprisingly amoral note. Bloom is an anti-hero that Billy Wilder would have loved: an ambitious creep whose lack of a moral compass proves to be a virtue.

Gyllanhaal may have made a couple of errors in the past few years (anyone remember "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time?"); but as he showed in last year's "Prisoners," he can be resourceful and determined. Add to that a convincing nerd factor and the occasional, curious flashes of charm and you begin to understand how fiercely he embraces Bloom. Gyllanhaal gets under this morally compromised character's skin both physically and emotionally in much the same way Robert DeNiro did in "Taxi Driver." But where DeNiro's Travis Bickle was a moral crusader, Lou Bloom offers his flip side: an amoral creep with vision. Gilroy's point that our culture has created a climate that allows Bloom to thrive may seem a bit heavy-handed, but Gyllenhaal's riveting performance makes it convincing. He spooks you out, as does the film.