“Dead Man’s Wire” Is a Tangle of Loose Threads

Key Highlights

• Because part of this saga unfolded in front of TV cameras, Van Sant’s film is also a story of media—its role in delivering news, in deciding what constitutes news in the first place, and in serving as an echo chamber for attention-seekers who are precisely trying to make news. The movie opens one Tuesday morning in February, with a suave-voiced, lyrically aphoristic d. j., Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), waxing cool on the airwaves—even as his casual riff, “Joker, joker, joker,” hints at a crisis that’s brewing in the mind of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), a fan of the show, who has tuned in while driving.
• A socially awkward man in early middle age, he’s on his way to the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company.
• But something seems off.
• Tony is flustered to learn that he’ll be meeting not with the firm’s boss but with the boss’s son, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), who is also a Meridian executive.
• Tony looks a little strange, too—one arm is in a sling and in his other he carries a long, thin, and battered box.