Michael Mann’s new film about the gangster John Dillinger is timely. For it’s said that the glorification of gangsters happens during times of economic depression — at least it did in America during the 1930s. For many Americans, Dillinger was a folk hero because he robbed banks that had robbed ordinary people of their jobs, homes and their lives. Given today’s anti-banker mood, can Dillinger, the most famous gangster of his time, and already the subject of two Hollywood films, make an iconic comeback? The challenge for Mann is to do for Dillinger what Arthur Penn’s 1967 film did for Bonnie and Clyde.

Any modern director of a gangster film based on a true story has to confront the question: how true do you make it? The creative friction between history and Hollywood often produces those wonderful gangster avatars who were half men, half myths. Here, Mann has sided more with the facts of history than the false, but seductive, fantasies of Hollywood. He shoots his film with handheld cameras that go right up into his stars’ faces, giving the illusion of a raw reality being captured. But he has also decided to shoot in high-def video, which is a mistake. It gives the film the magnifying-glass detail and intimacy of television drama. Clothes look like costumes, and you can actually see Johnny Depp’s mascara and Christian Bale’s foundation, which undermines the realism Mann is so keen to establish.

Public Enemies begins with an awkward and rather unsteady introduction to its two protagonists. John Dillinger (Depp) is leading an attempt to spring members of his crew from Indiana State Prison. The gang make their bungled getaway and we cut to bureau investigator Melvin Purvis (Bale) in a forest, shooting the gangster Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum). We are thrown head first into the action, while the wobbliness of Mann’s camera and the difficulty of comprehending the dialogue makes it hard to find your bearings. The film soon settles down, however, as we see Dillinger undertake a state of successful bank robberies, fall in love with a beautiful hat-check girl, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), escape from jail and shoot it out with the cops. Mann also interweaves the story of how the hunt for Dillinger gave birth to the FBI.

The narrative focus of the film is mostly confined to the hidden world of cops and robbers. What’s missing from this tale of modern America is Americans — the ordinary people who made Dillinger a star. And for a film so anxious to evoke the look and spirit of the times, curiously there’s no sign of the depression anywhere.

As for Dillinger himself, Mann and his screenwriters have opted for an uncritical portrait. Instead of a complex and flawed man who is actually rather deluded, we get a flattering portrait of the Gangster Gent. During one bank raid, Dillinger tells a customer whose own cash is on the counter: “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours.”

(I hate to spoil the fun, but the bank’s money was the public’s money.) He was nice to the women he took hostage, offering them his coat to keep them warm. He was funny, charming, brave, daring and clever. But to Mann he is also a thoroughly modern American type — a rootless, unrestrained creature of appetite, with no past, who lives only in a perpetual present. Here is a man who believes in grabbing the good life by the throat.

Fine, but who was John Dillinger? We never get beneath his skin or understand why he is a gangster and what he loves/hates about the gangster life. At one point, a friend asks what he’s going to do when he stops being a gangster, and Dillinger says he never thinks about doing anything else because he’s having “too much fun”. Outside of the bedroom, though, we never see him having any fun. The mark of a great cinematic gangster is that we envy him: his power, his freedom to transgress the rules and restraints the rest of us have to live by. Who would envy this man?

I suspect Mann has counted on Depp’s charm, good looks and star wattage to make sure we’re fascinated by his subject. But this he fails to do. At least crazy Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) has some psychotic ooomph to him; Depp’s Dillinger is decent and dull. Bale is wasted as Purvis, and only Cotillard really shines as the faithful girlfriend.

The screenplay, by Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, is rather good, with some nice wry moments. “What are you thinking about?” a character asks the captured Dillinger, who replies without missing a beat: “The electric chair.” But there’s a glaring contradiction between the screenplay, which pre­sents Dillinger as a man who wants everything, and wants it right now, and Depp’s laid-back, lac­onic acting style. For most of the film, he seems to talk in a whisper — you have to lean into the screen to get what he’s saying. What’s missing is any sense of urgency or the pathos of a man who really believes he can outwit the cops for ever.

And for all its furious car chases, feverish shoot-outs and high-speed robberies, Public Enemies lacks vitality. There’s a hole in the centre where an enthralling energy and exciting drama should be. For once, we get too much history and not enough Hollywood.

15, 140 mins

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