'Nightcrawler' satirizes local news

Louis Bloom, the character Jake Gyllenhaal so fiercely inhabits in writer-director Dan Gilroy's terrific, creepy satirical thriller Nightcrawler, is so thoroughly strange, such an alien misfit, and so sleazy, you're tempted to wash your hands upon first seeing him.

An unemployed misfit trawling the streets of Los Angeles for work, for distraction, or for confrontation, Louis opens the film with a violent crime. Caught stealing wiring from a construction site, he beats up the security guard and steals his big shiny wristwatch.

He sells the material at another site, then asks the foreman for a job. He'd even take an unpaid internship, says Louis, so he could grow into the opportunity.

Grow into what? Strangely slim (Gyllenhaal lost 30 pounds for the role), with greasy hair and dressed in a down-market brown leather jacket, Louis is a cross between Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, a bottom-feeder far too smart for his station in life. And horribly aware of that fact.

Louis doesn't so much talk as spout self-help lines, and he sticks, like spent chewing gum, to anyone who might help him earn some scratch.

He finds his métier one night when he happens upon a bloody car crash and watches with fascination as freelance TV cameraman Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) swoops in and shoots a pair of cops rescuing the driver.

Louis is a can-do guy, so the very next night he takes to the streets with a cheesy digital cam eager to find a place at the blood-filled trough that feeds TV news men and women in every major city.

"If it bleeds, it leads," Joe tells him at one point, while local news producer Nina (Gilroy's wife, Rene Russo) tells him to ignore the inner city and concentrate on crimes committed against middle-class folks.

ruHow much violence does she want? Louis asks Nina. Think of news, she says, as "a screaming woman, running down the street, with her throat cut."

Nightcrawler savages the news media's ratings-driven ethic (a most unethical ethic) with such force, it brings to mind Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's Network. (Russo's character bears more than a passing resemblance to the cutthroat network exec Faye Dunaway played in that 1976 masterpiece.)

The film's savagery isn't only thematic: As we might expect, Louis doesn't exactly stick to the rules, and he decides to play a slightly more, um, active role in his quest for camera-friendly violent crimes.

Yet, despite a mesmerizing performance by Gyllenhaal - he's as transfixing as a cobra in a snake charmer's dance - and a terrific turn by Riz Ahmed as an unskilled homeless kid Louis hires as his assistant, Nightcrawler doesn't quite have the satirical smarts that made Network a classic.

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