9 / 10
The Driver
Frank Lucas spends years as the driver and right-hand man of Bumpy Johnson, the powerful, old-school boss of Harlem. When Bumpy dies of a heart attack in an appliance store, complaining about how big chains are killing small businesses, Frank takes the lesson to heart. Cut out the middlemen. Go straight to the source.
He flies to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, buys pure heroin directly from growers in the Golden Triangle, and smuggles it back to America on military planes. He sells it on the streets of Harlem under the brand name Blue Magic, stronger and cheaper than anything else on the market, and within a few years he’s one of the richest criminals in America.
Ridley Scott directed it, from a script by Steven Zaillian, and it’s a big, confident, old-fashioned crime epic in the tradition of The Godfather and Goodfellas.
Denzel Washington
Washington plays Frank as a businessman first and a gangster second. He’s quiet, disciplined, courteous and churchgoing, he dresses conservatively and he despises flashy criminals who draw attention to themselves. He also shoots a rival in the head in broad daylight in front of a crowd, then goes to lunch.
The performance is chilling and charismatic, and ranks with Washington’s best. The contrast between Frank’s calm, polite manner and his capacity for brutal violence makes him frightening, and his devotion to his family, especially his mother, played by Ruby Dee, makes him complicated. He’s a monster who sees himself as a self-made American success story, and in a twisted way he’s right.
For Writers
Frank is calm, polite and devoted to his mother, and he shoots a man in the street in front of a crowd. The contrast makes him frightening.
A villain who’s courteous, disciplined and family-minded is far more unsettling than one who’s obviously evil. The reader is drawn in by the charm and shocked by the violence, and the gap between those two things keeps the character alive on every page.
Give your antagonist real virtues, ones they genuinely hold, and let those virtues sit side by side with their crimes. The reader will struggle to dismiss them, and that struggle is what makes the character memorable. Frank’s love for his mother is real. So is the body in the street.
Richie Roberts
Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, a New Jersey detective and law student whose life is a mess: his marriage is falling apart, he’s fighting for custody of his son and his colleagues hate him. Why? Because he found nearly a million dollars in unmarked cash in a car and turned it in, instead of keeping it. In a department where everybody’s on the take, a clean cop is a threat.
Richie is assigned to lead a new narcotics task force, and he starts tracking the source of Blue Magic. Crowe plays him as scruffy, stubborn and principled, a man who’s bad at almost everything except doing the right thing. His scenes are less glamorous than Frank’s, and they give the film its moral centre.
The Chinchilla Coat
Frank’s rule is simple: don’t be flashy. He dresses like a banker, lives quietly and warns his brothers that the loudest man in the room is the first one to get caught. Then his wife buys him a chinchilla coat and hat, and he wears them to the Ali-Frazier fight at Madison Square Garden, sitting in better seats than the Italian mobsters.
Richie notices. So does everybody else. It’s the one time Frank breaks his own rule. That’s the moment the investigation finds him. Afterwards, he throws the coat into a fireplace, furious with himself, but it’s too late.
The scene is small and brilliant, and it says everything about how empires fall: one moment of vanity, in front of the wrong audience.
Family Business
Frank brings his brothers up from North Carolina to work for him, and he builds the business around family and loyalty, like a Harlem version of the Corleones. His mother gets a mansion. His brothers get jobs and money. His wife, Eva, a former beauty queen, gets everything she wants.
It’s the source of his strength and, in the end, his weakness. Family members make mistakes, draw attention and become targets. Ruby Dee’s late scene, when Frank’s mother confronts him about what he’s become, slaps him and tells him she’ll leave if he keeps going, hits harder than any gunfight in the film.
Two Parallel Lives
The film cuts between Frank and Richie for well over two hours, two men building their lives on opposite sides of the law, never meeting until the very end. Frank grows richer and more powerful. Richie gets closer, one clue at a time.
Scott borrowed the structure from Heat, and it works. The two stories mirror each other: Frank is a criminal with a code, surrounded by corruption; Richie is a cop with a code, surrounded by corruption. Both men are outsiders in their own worlds. When they finally sit across a table from each other, the film has earned the meeting.
For Writers
Frank and Richie live parallel lives on opposite sides of the law and don’t meet until the end. The structure builds anticipation for their confrontation.
If you use this structure, make the two stories mirror each other: similar codes, similar obstacles, similar losses. The echoes will make the final meeting feel inevitable, and the reader will be desperate to see what happens when these two finally sit down. The longer the meeting is held back, the more it’s worth.
Two protagonists whose paths run parallel, never crossing until late in the story, can create enormous tension. The reader knows they’re heading for each other, and every scene becomes a step toward the meeting, whether the characters know it or not.
Dirty Cops
Forget Frank’s rivals. The film’s real villains are the crooked police. Josh Brolin plays Detective Trupo, a smug, corrupt New York narcotics cop who shakes down Frank and every other dealer in the city, and he’s truly nasty. The film suggests that the drug trade survived because the people meant to stop it were getting rich from it.
That’s the film’s sharpest point. Frank Lucas couldn’t have operated without the police taking their cut, and the most dangerous man Richie faces is a fellow cop.
For Writers
The film’s real villains are the corrupt cops who profit from the drug trade. The system is more dangerous than the gangster.
If your story has a villain, ask who enables them, and whether those enablers would make a more interesting and frightening antagonist. Corruption in the background makes every victory in the foreground feel smaller and harder won, and it gives your hero enemies on every side.
The most interesting crime stories often suggest that the problem is bigger than any one criminal. When the institutions meant to stop the crime are part of it, the story becomes a portrait of a society, and the hero’s struggle becomes much harder. Character Traits of Villains covers this well.
The Coffins
The film’s most notorious detail is that Frank smuggled heroin in the coffins of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. The image is shocking and powerful. It sticks in people’s minds.
It’s also disputed. Frank Lucas himself made the claim, and others involved, including some of the investigators, later questioned whether it happened the way he described. The real Lucas was a notorious self-promoter, and several of his stories changed over the years. The film takes his version at face value more often than it should.
True Story, Sort Of
American Gangster is based on a real case, and on a magazine article about Frank Lucas, but it takes a lot of liberties. Several of the real people involved, including DEA agents and some of Lucas’s associates, criticised the film for glamorising him and exaggerating his importance. Richie Roberts himself defended parts of the film while disputing others.
The closing title cards, claiming that Lucas’s cooperation led to the conviction of a huge share of the city’s drug squad, have also been challenged. Treat the film as a dramatisation. As history, it’s poor.
Huey, Nicky and Bumpy
The film is packed with good actors. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Frank’s brother Huey, drawn into the business, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the flashy rival Nicky Barnes, and Ruby Dee plays Frank’s mother, earning an Oscar nomination for a small but powerful role. Clarence Williams III is memorable in his brief scenes as Bumpy Johnson.
Harris Savides’s cinematography gives seventies Harlem and New Jersey a grainy, gritty richness, and the soundtrack is full of soul and funk. The film looks and sounds like its period.
Across the Table
The final act, in which Richie finally closes in and Frank is arrested after a raid on his operation, is tense and satisfying. The best scene comes afterward, when the two men finally meet face to face in an interrogation room. Frank expects a fight. Richie offers him a deal: help bring down the crooked cops, and he’ll get a lighter sentence.
The two men discover, to their surprise, that they respect each other. Their conversation is sharp and funny, the payoff the whole film has been building toward. It’s also a strange kind of friendship, between a drug lord and the man who caught him, and the film leaves it wonderfully unresolved.
Long, but Worth It
American Gangster is long, well over two and a half hours in its extended version, and the middle sags a little as the film piles on scenes of Frank’s growing empire. Its treatment of the real story is too generous to Lucas, and some viewers will find its glamour troubling.
Those are small complaints. It’s a gripping, handsome, superbly acted crime epic, with Washington and Crowe at the top of their games.
Craft Note
Craft Note
American Gangster tells the story of a criminal and the cop who catches him as two parallel lives, each with its own code, each surrounded by corruption. The structure turns a crime story into a portrait of a whole rotten system.
Parallel storylines work best when they reflect each other, so that each one deepens the meaning of the other.
If you’re writing two main characters on opposite sides, give them something fundamental in common, and let the reader discover it before they do.
Frank Lucas and the One Clean Cop
American Gangster is a 9: a big, gripping, beautifully made crime epic, with Denzel Washington’s chilling Frank Lucas, Russell Crowe’s stubborn cop and a sharp portrait of a corrupt system. It’s too kind to the real Lucas, and it’s too long, but it’s a hell of a film.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists