As a love letter to the city and disappearing way of life, writer-director Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York labours in the right direction. Trading off the weathered stature of John Turturro and other classic New York actors, Segan’s small-scale narrative also doesn’t ask too much; it knowingly deploys its tropes to note how things are changing, or have already changed.
Turturro plays Harry, a workaday thief riding NYC’s subways for wallets, phones, and whatever else he can slip into the folds of his large coat. The streets know him, including his fence Ben (Steve Buscemi) and rundown detective Warren (Giancarlo Esposito), but that means less and less as days go by. One night, Harry robs the wrong guy (an off-kilter Will Price) and suddenly finds himself crisscrossing the city for a different purpose: to recover a piece of tech he doesn’t understand so he can save his infirm wife (Karina Arroyave). As a plot, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is fairly generic and overly schematic, yet its low-key charms are effective enough to take us along for the ride. It helps that Turturro remains a delightful on-screen presence, having now properly aged into weathered roles like this one. (It’s funny to recall a tired Turturro in Rounders, made almost 30 years ago.) Drawn together, Segan’s film enjoys making its generational jabs—pickpocketing it tough when nobody carries cash anymore—while also dutifully lamenting that passage of time.
Like its aging hero, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York doesn’t linger too long in any one place and wraps up before things turn too bad. Still, the one-off nature of its various scenes, particularly as it tries to work some emotional levers in the third act, feels a bit cheap. And like most of Harry’s narrow life, the final score only just makes it worthwhile.
