Alpha Dog is ‘based on a true story” — specifically, a case of abduction and murder that took place in Southern California in 2000. Usually, when the words ‘based on a true story” appear on a movie screen, one sighs and rolls one’s eyes. The obvious fictionalisation of whatever happened often cancels out any benefits to be gained from a supposed echo of truth.
But Nick Cassavetes’s film has an air of verisimilitude that it manages to maintain throughout its length and hence Alpha Dog emerges as a credible ‘true story”. Of course that’s a con, too, in a way, because without some research (which viewers are unlikely to do) we can’t say how far the director and his script-writers have strayed from the original case. (In actuality, Johnny Truelove’s name was Jesse James Hollywood — the kind of name you simply couldn’t make up and which would appear too bizarre to be believed in a movie. One suspects that in some areas the filmmakers have actually toned down the real-life events.)
The point is that stylistically Alpha Dog works: Cassavetes et al have very competently produced a form of storytelling that makes the ‘based on a true story” claim feel apt.
That form has a lot in common with Larry Clark’s Bully and it feels as though Alpha Dog is very much a descendant of Clark’s kind of head-on, unembellished filmmaking. It has only a touch more of the Hollywood kind of narrative stylisation that makes so many movies look fake. Ironically, the decision to frame it with the very obvious device of TV-style interviews with some of the protagonists (as if someone were making a documentary rather than a feature film) draws attention to the fictionalisation of the story.
It’s all very well to have one Sonny Truelove give a reluctant and defiant interview to camera about his wayward son (a central figure in the crimes), but he’s played by Bruce Willis. Kudos to Willis for supporting a smallish movie, but the fact that in this interview we’re watching a big Hollywood star, with a very particular persona and no great acting range, destroys the sense of reality — and when Harry Dean Stanton staggers into the interviewer’s frame, all sense of documentary goes to hell. Then again, Sharon Stone has an extraordinary moment late in the film, in one of the staged or recreated interviews, but part of its power is that by then she’s largely unrecognisable.
Sonny Truelove’s son, Johnny (Emile Hirsch), is a young drug-dealer who gets involved in the inevitable spat with one of his dealing and consuming associates, Jake, who can’t deliver a certain cash payment on time. So, in a gesture that is as impromptu as it is inept, Johnny’s minions abduct Jake’s younger brother Zack, hoping to force payment out of Jake. Thus begins the spiral towards doom.
Justin Timberlake plays Johnny’s friend Frankie, who is responsible for keeping tabs on the abductee — and, in fact, shows him a rather good time. For a famous pop star, Timberlake manages very well to disappear into the role: his Frankie is convincingly decent-hearted, but also weak and indecisive. Shawn Hatosy, in the key part of Truelove’s dogsbody Elvis, is excellent, too, but Ben Foster (Six Feet Under and X-Men III), playing Jake, steals the picture with his terrifyingly convincing fury.
In all, Alpha Dog gives a very credible sense of these people, their milieu and the series of disordered events that end in the death of one of them. Teenybopper Timberlake fans will doubtless be shocked to see him in so unsympathetic a role (not that he isn’t looking good, in a gangsta sort of way). They may also be disappointed at the unblinking soberness of the movie, but not even they could deny the strength of its storytelling.