News-Record.com

The story centers on the last days of the outlaw Jesse James, at the end of a career as robber and folk hero. He is hounded, haunted, paranoid and dangerous -- but also warm, charming and whimsical.

Those doubting Brad Pitt can pull off tortured and fatalistic cowboy need to go back to Legends of the Fall (and, it could be argued, A River Runs Through It). The guy has some serious chops, and they're on full display here.

With the James-Younger gang all dead or in prison, Jesse and his brother Frank part ways. Frank settles down, but Jesse can't find solace in money, fame or family and takes two brothers from the last iteration of the old gang, Charley and Bob Ford, under his wing.

Little does he know that Robert Ford has idolized him since childhood, collecting dime novels and news clippings of his hero, making long lists of the ways they're just alike, essentially becoming a proto-celebrity stalker with a James obsession that would make Mark David Chapman's fascination with John Lennon seem like a passing fancy.

When Ford can't get the acceptance he wants from Jesse, he turns against him, conspiring with the governor of Missouri (James Carville with a real evil on) to capture or (and you know it's going to come to) kill James. Killing his hero will make him more famous than the man himself, he reasons -- and once he's on that psycho-train, there's no getting off.

Affleck is scary good as the repressed, obsessive Ford. You feel his pain and anger, you pity his madness, you grieve for him when he finally commits the murder and finds that, of course, it doesn't bring him what he really wanted. Nick Cave plays a barroom mistrel singing one of the songs that sprung up mocking Ford and deifying James as Affleck spins out of control, collapsing drunk, spent and miserable at the height of his post-assassination fame.

What was maybe most fascinating to me about the movie was its exploration of fame as a drug, as a prison, as an ultimately hollow and corrupting thing.

Knowing little about James before going into the movie it was strange to realize that, in his time, he was Brad Pitt. Hounded by the press, surrounded by people who want something from him, put upon by stalkers -- it's even said that "there are only two American names they know in Europe: Mark Twain and Jesse James."

The (historically accurate) scenes wherein James dead body is laid on a bed of ice for people to pose with is creepy, photographs of it sold for $2 a piece, splattered on the covers of magazines and shown alongside the pyramids of Egypt as one of the world's great wonders. Equally spooky is Ford's post-assassination occupation -- shooting James from behind onstage for a packed crowd more than 800 times.

By the time Ford's brother Charley (a pitiful, broken Sam Rockwell) is consumed with guilt and takes his own life, you feel maybe he's gotten off easy. Robert Ford, who wanted heroic fame but wound up as an infamous coward, had to live with himself.