Jake Gyllenhaal (Chuck Zlotnick/Open Road Films)

There are two good reasons to see Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s satire of media saturation and the self-made man. Cinematographer Robert Elswit captures a neo-noirish Los Angeles in all its gaudy neon poetry. And Jake Gyllenhaal’s greasy performance as Lou Bloom is a spot-on psychopath, spewing forth banalities like a deranged creep, but he never goes so far as to make his character someone you don’t recognize. I’ve worked with Lou Bloom, I’ve *been* Lou Bloom, and for the movie to work at all, the implication is that we all know and recognize this man, who in his social and financial desperation has taken a childlike naiveté and emotional-technological distance a step too far.

A big-eyed Keane painting come to life as a painfully awkward naïf, Lou Bloom is a Chauncey Gardiner for our time, a blank slate looking for a voice. The film suggests as much with its opening shot of an Edward Hopper-esque L.A. roadscape with an empty billboard. Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is an impressionable recluse who has been told he’s persistent. He spends much of his day on the computer. He’s not far from you or me. Especially if you or I were looking for work in a terrible job market.

Bloom makes do as a petty thief. We meet him trying to break through a chain-link fence, a detail that suggests the moral ambiguity of the Los Angeles classic Chinatown. A security guard questions him, and Bloom makes up a story before attacking the guard and driving away with a car full of stolen copper and manhole covers. He fails to sell them to a construction site, and his request for employment is quickly dismissed with, “I’m not hiring a thief.”

The scales fall from Bloom’s eyes when he’s driving along the freeway one evening and stumbles on a car wreck. He gets out of his car to look, and finds freelance cameraman Joe Loder (Blll Paxton), whose exclusive video footage of the wreck will earn him a few hundred bucks. When Bloom learns there’s money to be made in chasing down human drama, he forms a professional relationship with news anchor Nina Romina (Rene Russo).

Bloom and other nightcrawlers are the mercenary descendants of crime photographers like Weegee, memorialized in his own film by Joe Pesci in The Public Eye. But if Weegee reveled in the grotesque characters that wandered bloody streets, Bloom remains at a safe distance from humanity. Driven by technological society, he’s the perfect jaded consumer to enter crime scenes as if they were mere video games.

Nightcrawler is thoroughly watchable, but despite its strong central performance and atmospheric photography, it’s perhaps too slick and distant itself. Gyllenhaal immerses himself into his character, but he’s caught in film whose very stylishness seems to remove itself from the equation, as if movies are not themselves part of the cynical media machine it indicts.

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Nightcrawler
Written and directed by Dan Gilroy
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton.
Running time 117 minutes
Rated R for violence including graphic images, and for language
Opens today at AMC Georgetown, Regal Gallery Place, AMC Mazza Gallerie, Angelika Mosaic, and other area multiplexes.