Crazy & Thief

Cory McAbee will be in person for a Q&A and to perform music from his new project Captain Ahab's Motorcycle Club!

One of the largely unsung treasures of the contemporary American indie film scene, writer-director-actor-musician Cory McAbee’s small but singular filmography consists of just three features made over the last decade: the crazily inventive, black-and-white sci-fi/western/musicals The American Astronaut (2001) and Stingray Sam (2009), and now his latest, the poetic and wonderfully off-kilter children’s adventure film Crazy & Thief. Filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of Brooklyn, with McAbee’s own young children—seven-year-old Vy and three-year-old Johnny—in the leads, Crazy & Thief effortlessly immerses us in an alternately magical and frightening child’s-eye view of the world, as its two pint-sized protagonists set out, sans parents or guardians, in search of the mythical Star of Bethlehem. Theirs is an epic journey in miniature, punctuated by moments of childhood wonderment (catching a fly inside a plastic bag, marveling at an automated sliding door) and encounters with strangers of both noble and dubious intentions, all set to an infectious lounge-rock soundtrack by McAbee’s venerable band The Billy Nayer Show. Aptly described by Indiewire as a cross between Peanuts and Michel Gondry, Crazy & Thief also recalls Morris Engel’s seminal New York indie Little Fugitive in its lyrical sense of the city and eruptions of offhand, everyday beauty.