In writer-director William Monahan’s Mojave, Garrett Hedlund plays Thomas, a jaded Hollywood bad boy-star who wishes he were Byron or Rimbaud—or at least Jim Morrison. Arrogant and alienated from human feeling, he wonders pretentiously in a hoarse whisper: “When you get what you want, what do you want?”
Wandering in the desert after crashing his jeep while driving recklessly on a rough road, Thomas encounters a stranger (Oscar Isaac). The literate philosophically inclined vagabond talks about Shakespeare and the encounter between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness—the desert as a place of madness and epiphany. For no reason, Thomas attacks the stranger and leaves him for dead. But he’s not dead; the drifter tracks Thomas through the desert, witnesses the increasingly paranoid star as he shoots and kills a park ranger, and follows him home.
Mojave becomes a tense battle of wits and brawn between a pair of sociopaths, set against the hollowness of the quasi-indie film industry and the vastness of nature. “Do you know which of us is the bad guy?” the stranger demands. This time, it wasn’t Jesus and Satan but two demons that met in the desert. Isaac’s powerfully unsettling performance gives Mojave momentum.