American Animals (15)

“THIS is not based on a true story. This is a true story.” So reads the intriguing opening text of this ingenious crime drama from director Bart Layton, who made waves back in 2012 with his Bafta-winning documentary The Imposter.

Where that film used fictionalised drama as a backbone to documentary storytelling, this equally evocative and attention-grabbing film flips things the opposite way to tell the tale of one group of college students who decided to grab their piece of the American dream and had to watch it crumble in their hands.

Spencer (rising star Barry Keoghan) is a student at Kentucky’s Transylvania University who one day decides he wants to steal a priceless book of art from the school’s restricted access library section.

To do this he enlists the help of fellow, more hot-headed student Warren (Evan Peters). Together, eventually along with a couple of other students, Chas (Blake Jenner) and Eric (Jared Abrahamson), they start casing the place like they’re in Heat or Ocean’s Eleven.

They meticulously plan how they’re going to pull it off, assigning each other colour code names straight out of Reservoir Dogs, actually Googling “how to plan a heist”. All without a contingency plan in place.

As they soon find out, life isn’t a movie. Crime doesn’t pay and things certainly don’t go exactly to plan, exemplified in the film’s centrepiece heist which is one of the most nerve-wracking, sweaty palms, grit-your-teeth tense sequences in recent memory.

Layton infuses the narrative with the real-life figures of the true story talking straight to camera about their conflicting memories of what exactly happened, with their voices sometimes overlapping or overtaking the actors re-enacting events that would shape their lives.

It’s a bold directorial approach which pays off in spades, lending it a slick and distinctive edge. The two conflicting filmmaking styles work beautifully as we see the increasingly erratic actions reflected upon by the real people, sorrowfully.

Thematically it also feeds into the very idea of how much you can believe the truth simply because someone tells you that’s how it happened; rarely has “unreliable narrator” been so pertinent.

It’s refreshing to get a film that takes risks in both its style and in the way it challenges the fanciful notions that its central characters exemplify and recklessly chase after, staring down the idea that crime is a glamorous lifestyle worth living, while at the same time providing a stylish, entertaining, well-acted and unpredictable mini-crime saga in its own right. It’s a conundrum of a film as fascinating as it is audacious.