Sleight—which opened in wide release last Friday to little fanfare—is a minor film with major virtues: tenderness, imagination, and a strong grasp of character and setting. It takes place in working-poor Los Angeles, and one of its strengths is how it grounds the story in a palpable sense of economic desperation. The story features a young hustler who winds up in over his head—a conflict familiar from classic film noir—yet J.D. Dillard (directing a script he wrote with Alex Theurer) makes the archetypal premise feel fresh. The hustler is not an ordinary grifter, but a street magician, and his magic skills prove useful in getting him out of sticky situations. Moreover, his magic tricks are cool to watch—Dillard uses them to punctuate the story much like song-and-dance numbers punctuate a musical.
Of course this is easier said than done. Angelo wants Bo to take a more active role in his criminal enterprise, and the new responsibilities frighten the young hero. In one scene, Angelo takes Bo along with his henchmen to intimidate a rival drug dealer; in another, he forces Bo to chop off the rival’s hand with a butcher knife. With these developments Dillard makes Bo’s drug dealing seem like a life-or-death struggle, escalating the tension of what had seemed like a manageable job. Bo decides after the hand-chopping incident that the next week will be his last selling drugs. He attempts to double-cross Angelo by cutting a kilo of cocaine with baking soda so he can sell double the amount to make a healthy profit for himself. Angelo finds out about this, however, and demands that Bo pay him $45,000 for the cross, setting the stage for Sleight‘s suspenseful final act.
