The new Gus Van Sant film, Dead Man’s Wire, is the latest entry in what might be called the “crazy people doing crazy things on live TV” genre. This places the movie within the tradition of Dog Day Afternoon or Network, whose lead characters are explicitly or implicitly mad as hell and behave accordingly on TV. But unlike those classics directed by the incomparable Sidney Lumet, Van Sant’s movie lacks a properly critical perspective on its central antihero. The film prefers to paint its protagonist less as a nutcase and more as a folk hero.

Dead Man’s Wire purports to tell the true story of Tony Kiritsis, an Indianapolis malcontent who, in 1977, kidnapped a mortgage company official by lassoing a wire around his neck, tethered to a sawed-off shotgun. The ghastly episode, which culminated in an apocalyptically fascinating press conference with Kiritsis and his victim, occurred within a few years of the release of the Lumet films. It’s a perfectly natural subject for a movie. Unfortunately, the drama inherent in the scenario is undermined by the strained sincerity with which Kiritsis’s allegedly virtuous socioeconomic agenda is presented.