Josh Trank’s Capone skips the rise, the massacres and the trial, and starts where gangster films usually stop: in 1945, with a paroled Al Capone in Florida, his brain eroded by neurosyphilis, his family under federal surveillance and his fortune lost somewhere in his memory.

Most screen versions of Al Capone stop at the moment of his fall: the tax trial, the handcuffs, the cell. Capone, the 2020 film written, directed and edited by Josh Trank, begins long after that. It is Thanksgiving 1945, the former boss of Prohibition-era Chicago is living on his estate in Florida, and Tom Hardy plays him as a man who has been released from federal prison not because his sentence ended but because the disease in his brain made him harmless.

It is a biographical drama of 104 minutes with a compact ensemble: Linda Cardellini as his wife, Mae; Matt Dillon as Johnny, an old acquaintance from Chicago; Jack Lowden as an FBI agent; Kyle MacLachlan as the family physician; Noel Fisher as his son. The premise is the decline rather than the reign, and the setting makes the point on its own: Florida instead of Chicago, more than a decade after the empire ended.

The story: a boss who has outlived his empire

The household runs on what is left. Mae sells the luxury pieces that fill the house to cover the family’s expenses, while federal investigators keep watch on the property and everyone who comes and goes. Dr. Karlock, the physician, advises her to keep Capone’s surroundings familiar and to find a way to avoid moving him. The money is running out, and the patient cannot help.

The one thing the government still wants from him is a number. During a fishing trip with Johnny, Capone says he hid ten million dollars and cannot remember where. From then on the film follows two searches at once: the agents and relatives who want that fortune located before he dies, and Capone’s own mind, which drifts back into scenes from his Chicago years and keeps returning to a boy with a gold balloon and to a son, Tony, born outside his marriage, who rarely calls.

The structure follows that confusion instead of a conventional plot. There is no rise to chart and no trial to win; the story alternates between the household in the present and memories of Chicago that Capone can no longer tell apart from the people standing in front of him. Trank described his interest as the deconstruction of myth, and the decision to tell a gangster’s story from inside his dementia is the clearest form that idea takes in his work.

The real Al Capone’s last years

The history underneath is well documented. Alphonse Capone, born in Brooklyn in 1899, ran the Chicago Outfit from 1925 to 1931. Federal prosecutors could not make the violence stick, so they built the case on his income: on October 17, 1931, he was convicted on five counts of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years. He went to the Atlanta penitentiary in May 1932 and was moved to Alcatraz in August 1934.

The syphilis he had most likely contracted as a young man in Chicago reached his brain while he was in prison; the formal diagnosis came in February 1938, and he spent the last part of his Alcatraz term in the hospital section. He was paroled on November 16, 1939, after Mae appealed to the court on the grounds of his reduced mental capacity. After treatment in Baltimore, he settled at his Palm Island mansion in March 1940. In 1942 he was among the first patients in the United States to receive penicillin, which slowed the disease but could not reverse the damage. A 1946 examination concluded he had the mentality of a 12-year-old child. He died at home on January 25, 1947, at the age of 48.

The film compresses that period into roughly a year and adds its own devices. The missing ten million, Johnny’s visits and the agents waiting for a confession are the film’s dramatic material, built on a real situation: a household watched by the government, a fortune nobody could account for and a patient who could no longer explain anything. The historical record lists one son, Albert Francis Capone, known as Sonny; the boy Tony belongs to the film’s speculation about what a man like Capone might carry to the end.

Josh Trank after Fantastic Four

For Josh Trank, Capone was a return. Born in Los Angeles in 1984, he made his feature debut with Chronicle (2012), a found-footage superhero film shot for 12 million dollars that grossed more than 125 million worldwide. That success led to Fantastic Four (2015), a studio reboot that flopped commercially and critically; shortly before its release Trank posted, and quickly deleted, a message suggesting that the version in cinemas was not the one he had cut. He also left a planned Star Wars spin-off about Boba Fett.

Capone, announced in October 2016 under the title Fonzo, a diminutive of Alphonse, came after a five-year gap in his directing career. It is a smaller, original project in which he held the three key creative jobs of writer, director and editor, and he also gave himself a small part as one of the federal agents. Read against his first two features, it is the work of a filmmaker who chose a story about a once-powerful man reduced to the scrutiny of others.

Tom Hardy and the cast

Tom Hardy had built much of his career on real or larger-than-life men pushed to extremes, from the prisoner Charles Bronson in Bronson (2008) to both Kray twins in Legend (2015). He was attached to Fonzo from the 2016 announcement, made Venom (2018) first, and in March 2018 confirmed the Capone film as his next project. Here the part asks him to play a historical figure almost entirely through illness and ageing, a long way from the swaggering Capone of popular memory.

Around him, Linda Cardellini plays Mae Capone, the woman who married him in 1918 and, in real life, petitioned for his release. Al Sapienza plays his brother Ralph, Kathrine Narducci plays Rosie, Matt Dillon plays Johnny and Jack Lowden plays Crawford, the agent watching the house. Kyle MacLachlan, as Dr. Karlock, is the cast member with the strongest link to the man behind the camera: he starred in the 2017 Twin Peaks revival, which was shot by the same cinematographer.

Behind the camera: Peter Deming and El-P

That cinematographer is Peter Deming, whose career runs from Sam Raimi‘s Evil Dead II (1987) to David Lynch‘s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), a background in horror and dream logic that suits a story built on hallucination. The score is by El-P, the rapper and producer known from Company Flow and Run the Jewels, who had already written the end-credits track Another Body for Fantastic Four; the Capone score was released by Milan Records. The producers include Lawrence Bender, and filming took place in New Orleans between March 19 and May 15, 2018.

From Fonzo to a living-room premiere

Nearly two years passed between the end of filming and the release. On April 15, 2020, the trailer arrived with a new title, Capone, and with theatres closed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Vertical Entertainment and Redbox Entertainment released it through premium video on demand in the United States and Canada on May 12, 2020. It played in cinemas in a handful of territories, including Iceland, Lithuania, Portugal, Ukraine, Russia and South Korea, where it grossed 858,281 dollars against a reported budget of 20.6 million.

At home it found an audience quickly: it was the second most rented film on iTunes in its first days, and its 2.5 million dollars in digital sales over the first ten days set a record for Vertical. Critical response was mixed, with Hardy’s commitment drawing more praise than the shape of the film around him.

Where Capone sits in the gangster canon

Capone has been on screen almost as long as there have been gangster films. Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932) borrowed his nickname and his Chicago, and Brian De Palma‘s The Untouchables (1987) gave Robert De Niro the role at the height of his power, baseball bat included. Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas (1990) set the template for the genre’s rise-and-fall rhythm. Trank’s film takes the part of the story those films leave out: the epilogue, when the myth has outlived the man’s ability to remember it.

That makes Capone a curiosity rather than a companion piece. It is closer to a medical case history than to a crime saga, and whether its fragmented, hallucinatory approach works depends on what a viewer wants from Al Capone. As a record of Tom Hardy taking on a famous criminal at his weakest, and of Josh Trank trying to rebuild his career with a story about a man who could no longer rebuild anything, it remains one of the stranger American films of 2020.