“Nobody leads to my chair by mistake.” So recreation present contestant Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) is instructed late in The Luckiest Man in America by a chat present host (Johnny Knoxville) after he interrupts his taping.

The assertion, although reassuring, isn’t true within the literal sense; Michael has completely stumbled into this specific room by mistake. However it displays a need on the movie’s half to impart that means to Larson’s real-life story — to glean from it some deeper knowledge about his character or ours, to show it into one thing greater than only a bizarre factor that occurred as soon as.

Drawback is, it’s by no means completely clear what Michael is doing right here, or certainly what any of us are. As a temper piece, the Samir Oliveros-directed The Luckiest Man in America is lots evocative, filled with retro aptitude tinged with dread or dreaminess. However as a personality examine or a story, it’s too rooted in its specific place to increase its affect past it.

The screenplay by Oliveros and Maggie Briggs recounts occasions that is likely to be acquainted to viewers Gen X or older, however much less so to youthful ones. In 1984, the part-trivia, part-chance competitors Press Your Luck is the most well liked recreation present on TV — or at the very least “essentially the most Vegas recreation in America,” as put by its grinning host (Walton Goggins, one in every of many well-known names vastly overqualified for the modest supporting roles they’re given). Right into a routine casting name one afternoon walks Michael, an Ohio ice-cream truck driver effusing sappy reminiscences of watching the sequence each morning along with his household over bacon and eggs.

As performed by Hauser, Michael comes throughout like, effectively, a quintessential Paul Walter Hauser character. He’s instantly awkward in a method that, relying on the scenario, would possibly learn as barely pathetic, vaguely sinister or disarmingly candy. (The precise Michael appears to have been a bit smoother, at the very least based mostly on the compulsory snippet of archival footage positioned over the top credit.) Although he’s nobody’s concept of an apparent star, along with his wrinkled threads and beat-up journey, he exudes an aw-shucks affability that persuades creator Invoice Carruthers (David Strathairn) to solid him on the following day’s episode — in defiance of early purple flags that Michael’s Midwestern guilelessness would possibly itself be a entrance.

Then once more, nothing else at CBS’ Tv Metropolis is kind of what it appears, both. When Michael arrives for his taping, PA Sylvia (Maisie Williams) walks the contestants previous units dressed to seem like a jail or a Hong Kong alleyway. The impact is concurrently magical and a little bit disorienting, as if she is likely to be shepherding them right into a fantasy realm. By the point they arrive at their vacation spot, the Press Your Luck set appears concurrently of the world however aside from it. It’s not that actuality doesn’t rely right here, a lot as it’s filtered by layers of artificiality and bent round its personal arcane guidelines.  

At first, Michael’s look appears about what you’d count on. He whiffs a couple of trivia questions, bumbles by small speak along with his fellow gamers, loses a bit of change in an early spin. Then he hits a sizzling streak that, over the hours, goes from thrilling to inconceivable to obviously inconceivable. Within the management room, Invoice and his producers go from delighted to livid to terrified, fretting that his ballooning prize may bankrupt their whole manufacturing. The viewers feels somewhat in another way. To them, Michael isn’t just a very lucky fellow or a sneakily manipulative one. He turns into, as one producer observes, “the little man who comes and takes down the person.”

The Luckiest Man in America’s lengthy listing of govt producers contains Maria director Pablo Larraín, and one can sense his affect in the best way it trades the standard biopic clichés for a dreamier, extra subjective expertise. As designed by Lulú Salgado, the Press Your Luck set is a claustrophobic maze of tight corridors, blinding lights and false fronts. Sound design by Andrés Velásquez periodically distorts the hum of electronics or the chatter of a crowd right into a low rumble, as if some creature is likely to be approaching from the bowels of the earth. At times, a devil-red mascot named Whammy silently materializes in a nook, like a grim reaper in wait.

Although nothing that occurs right here is explicitly surreal, these inventive decisions make the studio really feel like a type of purgatory. As Michael racks up a record-breaking purse, he’s confronted with an accounting of types. Fearing for their very own jobs, employees members break into his truck for clues about his actual historical past or actual motives. They dredge up outdated enemies and bitter reminiscences in makes an attempt to throw his confidence, or dangle guarantees of fame and fortune to control him. Michael’s weaknesses are placed on show, like his conceitedness and informal disregard for the foundations. So are his strengths, just like the ingenuity that enabled him to see by the mechanics of the sport in a method that nobody else has earlier than. Hauser throws himself into each nuance of Michael’s roiling emotional states, from self-satisfied delight to debilitating nervousness.

Again in that speak present chair, Michael confides that the true purpose he’s come on Press Your Luck is to reconnect along with his estranged spouse (Haley Bennett) and daughter: “All I would like is to have breakfast with my household, however the one method I can is that if I’m on their TV set.” Being seen over the airwaves, nevertheless, isn’t the identical factor as making a real emotional connection. The Luckiest Man in America in the end declines to move judgment on Michael, providing neither simple uplift nor stern moralizing. We’re, as an alternative, left to attract our personal conclusions. However in its trendy ambiguity, the movie leaves too little for us to essentially chew on. The second Michael isn’t on our display screen anymore, he would possibly as effectively stop to exist.