Director Richard Linklater thrives at documenting the offbeat and odd, and his new movie Hit Man is no exception. A twisted rom-com about what happens when you’re too good at pretending to be someone else, the film is loosely based on the true story of a Houston psychology teacher who pretended to be a contract killer for police sting operations. (The journalist Skip Hollandsworth, dean of Texas crime reporting, set down that story in a 2001 magazine article; Hollandsworth’s work also inspired Bernie, Linklater’s 2011 film about a Texas town shaken by the news that a genuinely nice local man may have murdered a rich widow.) Hit Man is a witty, diverting, and clever caper, even as it sometimes seems like Linklater has chosen to elevate the surface-level quirkiness of the material over deeper ideas or artistic risks. 

Linklater has carved a career as an indie auteur known for shaggy, seemingly formless films driven by characters, conversations, and settings more than by conventional plots. His first film, Slacker (1990), was a dry and dazzling composite portrait of the Austin, Texas, counterculture at a time when Austin was still, in fact, “weird.” It followed a series of constantly shifting characters, spending no more than a few minutes with any one person. Many of his other best-known films have had a similar allergy to convention: 1993’s Dazed and Confused, a cult classic about high school students in 1970s Texas, had recognizable character threads but no three-act structure to speak of. And Before Sunrise (1995), which was followed by two sequels, took the form of an extended conversation between a man and a woman who meet by chance on a European train.