Recasting the Male Lead in Cinema: ‘Urchin’, ‘The Mastermind’, and ‘One Battle After Another’

For this autumn film installment, I chose three movies anchored by spectacularly acted male leads who, in at least two cases, are rather pitiable figures – men who end up in even worse rags than when we first met them.

From the spiky and subversive social realism of Harris Dickinson’ Urchin, zooming in on the life of rough sleeper Mike (Frank Dillane) as he tries to escape a self-descriptive spiral; to Kelly Reichardt’s anti-climactic and deconstructed heist The Mastermind, which sees Josh O’Connor as the meek art-school dropout James living in suburban East Coast America; and finally the tragicomic figure of Bob Ferguson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another – an ex-revolutionary now tasked with protecting his daughter’s safety, robed in a tartan bathrobe and brandishing a vape. These movies, albeit very different in style, themes, tone, and direction, have in common a refreshing display of highly vulnerable men who are not clear of the expectations and pressures to provide, protect, self-actualise but navigate them with a different emotional register and quietly fail to comply while revealing the intimate, often messy realities of their inner lives. 

While fallibility has been more common and normalised for female protagonists, for male protagonists it’s still comparatively rare and often comes coded as weakness or comic-relief or is restricted to the realm of indie and arthouse cinema. My question is: are these movies part of a wider redefinition of male protagonists in contemporary cinema?

Urchin

British actor Harris Dickinson, whom we remember recently and vividly as the young intern who made Nicole Kidman lap milk out of a cat bowl and dance topless to the notes of George Michael’s Father Figure, confirms with his directorial debut Urchin that his skills extend to behind the camera too.

We follow Mike (Frank Dillane), a young homeless man in London who’s been sleeping rough for the past five years and is trying to escape the cycle of self-destruction and turn his life around as he navigates addiction. Dillane – known for playing the young Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – is highly watchable on screen, tender and humane as the lead, bestowing upon us one of the best performances I’ve seen at the cinema this year. Rather than entitled, Mike is charming, apologetic and gentle. At the start, we see him attempting to recover money from another rough sleeper, Nathan (played by Dickinson himself). But when he can’t get his money back and a man offers him food, Mike, rather than accepting the kindness, mugs him. 

After a stint in jail and during his probation period, a sober  Mike is given a place to stay in a hostel and a job in a hotel kitchen, even though the social worker who is handed his case points out to him that, as an able-bodied white man with a criminal record and a history of violence, “he is not the system’s top priority”. The time during which Mike has a bed and a job offer a brief moment of respite, one during which we hope he might turn his life around. He befriends colleagues – two women working at the hotel – and one night the three of them go to a karaoke bar, singing Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again” (a perfect tune to punctuate this moment), before driving through the city with their heads out the window, heckling passersby, and eventually ending up in a remote parking lot laughing and drinking seemingly without a care in the world. Mike is having fun, he’s making friends, and we love that for him. Gradually, though, the pressures of the job overwhelm him, and his manager is forced to fire him.

Dickinson allows himself to indulge in some magical-realist flourishes, giving us a break from the gritty realism, in the same way in which Andrea Arnold introduces the fantastical in Bird (both Arnold and Mike Leigh, as well as Ken Loach, are clear models for the young director). These moments jolt us out of the everyday (homelessness, addiction, life on the margins) and into Mike’s inner emotional and psychic world, reminding there is always something more lying beneath the surface. One of the film’s most recurring images is that of the cave, to which Mike returns repeatedly. It underscores his isolation and marginalisation, his separation from the world because of his status, but also functions as a metaphorical threshold, a space he must traverse to confront himself and achieve transformation. 

The word that comes to mind most when describing this movie is empathy, and it is perhaps Dickinson’s greatest achievement when it comes to the character’s portrayal. He moves closer and closer to his subject, reveling in Mike’s outer and inner life with strokes that are precise and caring, capturing the character’s specific humanity. Some details, like the meditation cassettes Mike listens to at the hostel, repeating mantras such as, “The road is clear. Each decision is yours. Your possibilities are endless,” are his access to therapy, and feel particularly endearing as clumsy self-help tools. Mike’s trepidatious energy towards emotional closeness – observed when he meets Andrea (Megan Northam), a young woman who is also picking up rubbish for a job and with whom he has a brief relationship – feels moving. The timid way in which Mike’s body navigates these interactions makes you think he’s almost never been intimate before, or that he doesn’t remember how to be.

Dickinson doesn’t shy away from the brutal realities of addiction: the selfishness and cruelty it breeds, and how tragically inescapable it can feel. But whereas his old frenemy Nathan, more ruthless than Mike, has found himself in a cushy position living with an old lady and feeding her pet snake, Mike finds it harder to feel worthy of anything “good” and rather than take any small opportunity that might come his way as a grounding force, spirals back into addiction. Ultimately, Urchin lingers in the quiet spaces of Mike’s life, refusing easy resolutions or tidy redemption arcs; it’s showing that survival is not always heroic, and that transformation can be slow, fragile, and often imperceptible. 

The Mastermind 

I took myself to the cinema on a rainy London evening, under the onset of a cold, to see Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, starring Josh O’Connor as a wannabe art thief in a small Massachusetts town in the 1970s. Perhaps predisposed by a momentary craving for a quiet, understated film – one in which autumnal orange tones dominate and the camera lingers slowly on characters whose dialogue is sparse and tentative – and already a fan of Reichardt’s works such as First Cow, I found myself enjoying it far more than I expected.

James is an unemployed architect and art-school dropout, living with his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and their twin sons in a suburban East Coast town. Their life is quiet and mundane: they often visit the local art museum and attend dinners at James’ parents’ house, where his father Bill (Bill Camp), the local judge, never misses an opportunity to make his son feel small or compare him unfavourably to his peers. The mother Sarah (Hope Davies) functions as James’ financial backstop, the person he goes to when he needs money for his latest vanity project. This time, he requires funds to pay two “friends” to help him rob the local museum of four paintings  by American artist Arthur Dove – though of course she doesn’t know what he’s up to.

The robbery itself unfolds more sluggishly than one might expect: it happens in broad daylight but the guard is fast asleep, and no one notices the paintings being taken down (except for a teenage schoolgirl, at whom a gun is briefly pointed as she’s made to crawl under a museum bench). Naturally, everything unravels afterward: one of the men is arrested, another talks, and soon a pair of goons come after James to recover the paintings and claim the $2,000 reward. He ends up on the run, leaving behind his wife and children. Later, we see him in a motel, discovering another man’s passport and swapping the photo for his own, though he never manages to use it to cross a border. 

Essentially, nothing really happens in this film – and that’s kind of the point. The entire plot begins from a premise so gratuitous it borders on absurd: James has no real reason to steal the paintings. He and his wife have a home, they get by alright, his family supports them. Precisely because his motive isn’t need, the act feels, paradoxically, like a kind of liberation: a gesture of rebellion against his own complacency.

While The Mastermind nominally presents itself as a heist film, its true focus painstakingly lingers on the most mundane and uneventful aspects of the caper, privileging character study over plot. The narrative dwells on James’ puerile ambition and subsequent failure, subverting expectations of the genre, at the detriment of an exploration of other perspectives. Supporting characters (most notably Terri) are frustratingly underdeveloped, even though, as a friend observed, “the only smart characters here are precisely the women”: they are the ones who set boundaries, provide care, and bankroll James’ follies. Yet James (whose eyes we see this through) barely notices, wrapped in his self-absorption.

In complete antithesis to One Battle After Another, The Mastermind is a movie about individualism and political apathy. The lull in pacing mirrors James’ lack of direction, his navel-gazing, and preoccupation with success, as well as his blindness to his own privilege. When a friend suggests he seek refuge at a commune  in Canada, James refuses, saying, “It isn’t really my scene.” 

Meanwhile, a whole world unfolds quietly in the background (the Vietnam War peeks timidly from TV screens or the radio) but James barely notices. The larger political context does not faze him, and perhaps he is the most pathetic – even if he does look quite cute in boxers – of the three male characters we encounter in these films. While some might draw comparisons to the character O’Connor plays in La Chimera, the charming tombarolo, James has little in common with him. In that instance, Arthur possessed a “gift”: he understood and appreciated art, whose value was both material and esoteric. Here, art is merely a vehicle out of mediocrity, and therefore entirely transactional. The scene in which O’Connor secretly meets the two men he has hired in his basement, to brief them about the heist, only for his wife to walk down and check on him, evokes the “caught red-handed stealing from the cookie jar” feeling one would expect from a teenager scheming with friends, rather than an adult plotting a serious heist. It’s laughable, and yet we can’t help being partly endeared to him.

But it’s really in the final scene that James reaches peak pathetic – robbing an old lady just to afford a bus ticket – and during which Reichardt delivers the film’s bleakest irony. Swept up in a street protest and mistakenly arrested as one of the demonstrators, he finally faces the kind of reckoning he’s been dodging all along. It’s a closing note that feels moralising, yes, perhaps it’s the most heavy handed choice Reichardt makes during the whole movie, but it works. The politics James had so willfully ignored in favour of his own petty ambitions return, quite literally, to trample him.

In the end, The Mastermind is about the quiet, often comical tragedy of a man whose ambitions far outstrip his ability to realise them. James’ failures are small in scale but large in implication: he is  a man who steals from his mother, abandons his wife and children, reaches out to friends only when he needs help hiding. It’s the portrait of a 30-something male’s arrested development, the consequences of self-absorption, and of the desperate craving to not feel small and useless – which is what makes him both exasperating and ultimately, strangely sympathetic. How could we not, as viewers, empathise with the very humane need to find purpose and place in the world, with the urge to self-actualise? Reichardt’s patient camera work and Mazurek’s evocative score allow us to feel the awkwardness and ineptitude; in a film with otherwise so little dialogue, the music and photography carry the emotional weight that the script withholds, a counterpoint articulating the things the protagonist himself cannot. 

One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who sure has range: Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, Magnolia, Liquorice Pizza – he dabbles in styles and hops between genres and rarely misses a trick. One Battle After Another – adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, a writer PTA loves –  sure confirmed my appreciation for a director who can really put on a show. This is a maximalist, bombastic political action-movie about a revolutionary cell called “The French 75” which operates against a conservative US government to help free illegal immigrants from detention camps and give them shelter. And even though the film is deeply aesthetic, plot-driven, tense, and anxiety-inducing in the same way that Uncut Gems made you want to pop a lorazepam halfway through, it doesn’t do it at the complete detriment of the relationships it portrays. 

The movie opens during one of the group’s operations – they are freeing immigrants from a detention camp near the U.S‑Mexico border, triggering a chain of militant actions including bombing a senator’s office and disrupting infrastructure. The cast is extraordinary, but let’s focus on the main players. Teyana Taylor is Perfidia Beverly Hills, in a relationship with Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). They are shown in the back of a car, speeding away from one of their actions, giddily making out, exhilarated by the force of their political idealism.

On the other end of the spectrum is Colonel Steven L. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn. Early on, we learn that, despite attempting to join a white supremacist secret society (called the Christmas Adventurers), he harbours a fetish for black women;  a tension that quickly entangles him with Beverly Hills. “Do you like Black girls? I love them,” Lockjaw whispers to Bob in one of the early scenes. They have an affair, she becomes pregnant, and when a bank heist goes awry, the revolutionary cell disbands. Perfidia is caught and enters witness protection after ratting out her comrades, leaving her daughter Willa with Ferguson.

Because this is a film about politics, conspiracy, and the larger webs of power – themes dear to Pynchon and skillfully reflected by PTA – the individual exists largely in relation to these forces, with the patriarchy and traditional notions of masculinity being central among them. In this context, Ferguson and Lockjaw are pitted against each other in the quest to find Willa. Their confrontation is more than an expertly executed high-octane chase; it serves as a way to explore two contrasting models of “manhood” (albeit somewhat caricatured): the worn-out dreamer and the relic of authority. Bob is now a washed-out single father, navigating domestic hideout life, drinking and smoking excessively, and struggling to raise a teenage daughter. Lockjaw is prepared to do anything to gain acceptance into a white suprematist society – including getting rid of his mixed race daughter.  For lack of better words: these are two white men each claiming paternity and legacy. And Both DiCaprio and Penn deliver unforgettable performances.

DiCaprio’s Ferguson drifts through the film like a ghost of failed revolutions. But his politics don’t necessarily anchor him nor give him a higher moral ground: he is driven as much by desire and adrenaline as by any coherent political vision (rebellion as performance, ideology as costume, etc.) There’s something faintly comic in his idealism and tenderness, his masculinity feels porous, frayed at the edges, built not on dominance but on a kind of weary attentiveness to the daughter he vowed to protect and to the echo of what he once believed in. Penn, meanwhile, looms in from another cinematic age: all grit and command, a man who still speaks the language of power even as it curdles on his tongue. 

Overall, the film blends extreme realism – deportation, immigration, political activism, fatherhood – with fantastical, over-the-top sequences, like the unforgettable moment when Perfidia Beverly Hills fires a machine gun while heavily pregnant. Jonny Greenwood’s score, a long-time PTA collaborator, is nothing short of epic, perfectly complementing the film’s sprawling, chaotic, and darkly comic narrative.

In the end, Ferguson (despite his confusion, disorganisation, and frayed nerves) reaches his daughter, but he doesn’t save her: Willa saves herself, where Bob would have been late time and time again. Lockjaw instead, receives the comeuppance he deserves with a double, gory, death: both at the hands of the Christmas Adventurers Society. At least romantically, Bob’s messy, imperfect heroism triumphs over Lockjaw’s rigid, old-school authority, underscoring the film’s fascination with flawed masculinity and the human side of men navigating power and responsibility.

---

Taken together, these three films, operating at very different registers, suggest that contemporary masculinity on the big screen is no longer (or not only) about swagger or unshakable competence. Male fallibility is depicted not as a private flaw but as a site of tension between the individual and larger forces – be they societal, historical, or political. In each case, the characters’ missteps, failures, and frailty are legible in relation to these pressures, making their struggles both intimate and systemic; and it’s often precisely their flailing, their awkward humanity, that makes them so compelling to watch. Vulnerability isn’t a side note here, it’s the main act.

Recent cinema seems increasingly willing to let men be messy, frail, and wounded. Rather than rhetorically managing their disorientation or recasting it as a social emergency, these films turn crisis into character—a choice that feels both more interesting and less tone-deaf. Of the three, Bob is the one granted the more satisfying epilogue – perhaps because One Battle After Another is ultimately a blockbuster, which wouldn’t have worked with the quieter, more introspective endings of Urchin or The Mastermind. Yet he is still far from the sexy, reckless, Perfidia-bound revolutionary he was at the start of the film: at the end, the hero is just a dad who still sometimes likes to smoke pot.


Header image: Josh O’Connor in The Mastermind.