Mac (Benjamin Madrid) is on a roll, an endless North American road trip leaving many states and provinces in the rear view. He’s a shrewd hustler motivated by escaping the chaffing bonds of everyday life. Mac is a grifter who knows every trick. He’s a shark in the pool room, a piranha at the poker table with snake eyes whenever the dice are rolled.
Director and co-writer Peter Matsoukas’ No Place cycles through the conventions of film noir as transposed to the present day. The plot advances when Mac reluctantly agrees to take a big job, robbing a safe in the home of “some scumbag in a suit.” Like many noir heroes and anti-heroes before him, he finds himself in a labyrinth of double-cross and deceit.
The terse screenplay (co-written by Madrid) descends from the hardboiled crime fiction that fed the original noirs of the 1940s. Matsoukas-Madrid’s spin on the genre is to insert clips of Mac performing stand-up comedy at open mics while on the road. Although the audience laughs, he’s really not very funny; his timing is terrible, but the monologues serve an interesting meta function as commentary on the plot. No Place also plays with narrative chronology in Mac’s ongoing fling with Evelyn (Afton Shepard), whom he encounters while drinking dark liquor in dark bars. Turns out Mac’s scenes with Evelyn are flashbacks.
As the femme fatale that Mac falls for, Shepard plays the role with the frank insouciance of a young Gwyneth Paltrow. The screenplay gives reason to suspect a heart of cold hiding under Mac’s phlegmatic surface. Madrid acts the part like a good card player, unrevealing and shrewd. Ric Payne plays underworld kingpin Vic with a knife’s glint of malice beneath his amicable mien. Hugo Bolden gives a memorably quirky performance as the illegal gun dealer who might have reason to want Madrid dead.
