Much like Hardy’s turn at the titular gangster, Trank’s Capone is messy and unfocused; a peculiar blend of straight-laced biopic and hallucinatory psycho-drama.

Following the Chicago mobster in his final year of life, slipping between memory and nightmare as a consequence of his diagnosed neurosyphilis, the film’s portrayal of Capone is perhaps uncertain of exactly what it is trying to say about the man; living the life of a king in a swampy Florida mansion, but unable to appreciate or, indeed, engage with any aspect of the luxurious lifestyle his criminal career has accumulated. Hardy’s performance is mostly captivating, if only for his evident physical and emotional investment in the role, although at times this ventures more towards the unhinged, caricatural acting we saw in Venom, than say the frenzied but carefully measured performance of Bronson.

Where this film falls short is arguably down to the cliched narrative beats and ‘twists’ which left me wondering why exactly we should care about this character or his surrounding family. Capone’s decline into mental deterioration supposedly gives Trank license to imbue his film with the kind of tropes and iconography normally seen in psychological horror, a strange concoction which doesn’t exactly gel as well as the film thinks it does. More broadly, the collection of potential dramatic sub-plots – an FBI investigation, an estranged son, a moral reckoning – are introduced but mostly left hanging.

Written, edited and directed by Trank himself, the subject is of clear interest and importance to the director, although the lack of editorial or secondary input at these higher levels perhaps left him unable to see the wood for the trees, with characters, themes and key narrative information left mostly unexplained or uncontextualised for the casual viewer, and at least one major plot hole (at least to my mind) around Matt Dillon’s character resulting in an experience which is as confused and hazy as the titular gangster himself.