Starring Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Michael Pitt, and Myke Tyson, Asphalt City certainly runs the gamut from the tippy top of the acting profession, through the ‘good, not great’ category, and all the way down to ‘what the hell were they thinking?’
Early in his career, Sheridan would overperform when paired with a heavyweight like McConaughey or Cage. This turn opposite Penn harks back to those days without being a full-fledged return to form. On the one hand, Pitt effortlessly outshines him in their handful of scenes together; on the other, Tyson makes Sheridan look like Penn, and Penn look like God.
Seriously though, Sean Penn is a national fucking treasure. With Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and Gene Hackman retired (some more happily than others), Christian Bale selling out to Marvel, Michael Shannon turning up in Bullet Train, Kevin Spacey maintaining a lowish profile, an apparently senile Robert De Niro continuing to embarrass himself (and the unfortunately long list goes on), Penn is hands down your Last Man Standing (well, him and arguably Leo DiCaprio) — still out there trying to do stuff that matters.
At one point, Gene ‘Rut’ Rutkovsky (Penn) makes a joke about pedophilia. The thought crossed my mind, almost like a reflex, ‘who else could get away with that?’ But he can’t, and he doesn’t, and he’s not supposed to.
Rut is not, mind you, a pederast himself, but he is a deeply yet deceptively disturbed man, and his darkest moment does involve a child (literally a newborn); he’s otherwise a hardened but efficient, caring even, veteran — making his admittedly deserved downfall, for which his previous, ostensibly harmless flouting of “the protocols” had not prepared us, all the more unexpected and shocking.
It’s nothing short of admirable for Penn — this late in the game, at 63 years of age — to keep pushing himself, to keep taking on these roles, to keep making these choices, to keep assuming these risks, to keep professing this unwillingness to compromise a filmmaker’s vision for the sake of a happy ending — which he could easily do if he were inclined to exercise his star power.
But then Sean Penn is not a movie star; never has been and hopefully will never be a movie star. A movie star would look to protect his image at the expense of the character. A movie star would rely more and more on unchallenging crowd-pleasers, like De Niro. That’s why, of all the people I mentioned and other I didn’t, Penn is the active actor with the most consistent body of work overall.
But let’s get back to the film. As episodic, New York City-based, paramedic-oriented dramas go, Asphalt City lacks Bringing Out the Dead’s sheer entertainment value (and its title sounds like a placeholder that someone forgot to change), but it’s more down to earth and runs a whole lot deeper.
Oh, and it also does run a gamut, from Sheridan’s wide-eyed, bushy-tailed idealism, through the cynicism of Pitt (in the Tom Sizemore role), all the way to the irretrievably jaded Rut, and then back to a battle-tested and tentatively optimistic Sheridan (additionally, there is a small but crucial character played by Catch the Fair One’s Kali Reis). It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it’s done like we haven’t seen recently.
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