At Close Range (1986)

Directed by James Foley. Starring Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn, Millie Perkins, Tracey Walter, R. D. Call, Crispin Glover, Eileen Ryan, Stephen Geoffreys, J. C. Quinn. [R]

Cold, ominous drama, made all the more unsettling by the knowledge it’s based in truth. Trapped in poverty with his mother and her loutish boyfriend, delinquent unemployed teen Penn turns to a life of crime with his no-good father (Walken) and the man’s gang of miscreants. The docudrama-style filmmaking only enhances the story’s disturbing credibility, although somewhere along the way in the final act, its bitter fatalism crosses the line into gratuitous nihilism before a course correction just before the final scene. Starkly photographed by Juan Ruiz Anchía, the viewer shares in the young protagonist’s excitement at running wild on the wrong side of the law and falling for a local girl (Masterson) and getting some money in his pocket for the first time, and then the wintry dread after the kid realizes he’s in too deep with scary criminal sociopaths. Penn is magnetic and tragic in a powerful performance, matched by Walken’s controlled hatefulness creating a vivid real-world monster. The song heard over the end credits (“Live to Tell”) is performed by Penn’s then-wife, Madonna. Eileen Ryan, who plays the grandmother of the characters played by Sean and Chris Penn, is the actors’ real-life mother. David Strathairn, Kiefer Sutherland, and Candy Clark have small roles.

82/100