Tony Kiritsis fought the law and the law won. This may seem like a weak premise for a high-tension hostage drama, but with "Dead Man's Wire," director Gus Van Sant has turned the Kiritsis case, a true-crime media sensation back in the 1970s, into a comical screw-the-rich underdog tale. He has done this by boldly adjusting substantial facts in the story, which may be an annoyance for those who know them. But Van Sant puts the movie over with the help of a well-chosen cast and a wonderfully frazzled performance by his star, Bill Skarsgard, who plays the luckless Kiritsis.

The facts that we know: In February of 1977, the 44-year-old Kiritsis, a loosely wrapped resident of Indianapolis, was on the verge of losing his mind. He had bought 17 acres of land on which he planned to build a shopping center, and he already had merchants lined up to move in. But he had financed this project with money he'd obtained from the Meridian Mortgage Company, and now, with a major payment coming due in just three weeks, he was heavily sweating the fact that he had nowhere near enough funds to cover it.

Unwisely, Tony decided to pay a personal visit to the Meridian office and attempt to get an extension on his repayment schedule. Previous efforts to do this had been brusquely slapped down by company president Dick Hall (played in the movie by Dacre Montgomery, of "Stranger Things"). But Tony suspects that his real nemesis is Dick's father, M.L. Hall (played by Al Pacino as a soulless toad), who he thinks wants to cheat him out of his land. (Or something: Many of the financial aspects of this story are hazy and vaguely conveyed.)

Tony goes to the Meridian office accompanied by a sawed-off shotgun and a pistol. Also a length of wire, one end of which he attaches to the barrel of the shotgun and the other to Dick's neck ... and then back to the trigger (or something). This setup ensures that if Tony should be killed or overwhelmed, the taut wire will automatically yank the trigger, leaving a cloud of pink mist where Dick's head once was.

In this scenario Van Sant wants us to see the roots of today's true-crime culture and the crude tabloid TV coverage of daily passing disasters. The fact that some viewers have the hots for Tony ("Has he got a girlfriend?") echoes the nitwit adoration we've seen for Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of a strolling insurance-company executive in 2024. Meanwhile, the movie's script, by TV veteran Austin Kolodney, takes knowing swipes at familiar media types. We see a preening anchorman standing outside in the snowy cold with little new to say about the Kiritsis drama, which is beginning to drag. "You stand out here long enough," he tells his viewers vapidly, "you've got time to think. And sometimes that's good."

The movie gets a jolt of twitchy energy every time Skarsgard turns up. With his sad mustache and hopeless clothes sense (his shirt is of a green rarely seen outside of supermarket fruit bins), his Tony is a man torn between jittering paranoia and disarming politeness. Having imprisoned Dick in his cheerless apartment after evading the cops (but not the circling TV news vans — a recent media innovation), Tony allows the mild-mannered nepo nerd to call his wife. "Tell her I'm sorry," he says earnestly.

A number of other well-drawn characters cruise through the action, most memorably Myha'la Herrold as an ambitious TV reporter getting her first shot at prime-time validation, and Colman Domingo as a serenely hip Black radio DJ who gets involved in the Kiritsis story when it's discovered that Tony is a fan of his show. (In real life, Domingo's character was a white radio-station news director — the race switch enables Van Sant to, among other things, slip a classic Gil Scott-Heron recording, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," onto the soundtrack.)

The movie is surprisingly funny, even if Tony remains a mystery to the end. Has he no passions, no life partner ("I've had my fair shot at love," he says ambiguously), no interests beyond minor Midwestern real estate deals? What do we really know about the guy? Or is the answer everything?

Photo courtesy of Elevated Films