If anything, it's a docudrama, but that seems almost a dirty word, implying cheapness whereas American Animals is slick and clever.

Part of what makes American Animals so compelling is that it's not a dramatisation or even a documentary. Their actual robbery is the sort of clumsy bungling affair you would expect of a bunch of college students who watched too many movies and assumed they knew everything they needed to know about pulling off the crime of the century. And like reality, the plan falls by the wayside when they lose their nerve at the last minute. At first, the boys fantasise about pulling off the heist as super cool besuited master criminals, moving to the sound of Elvis' A Little Less Conversation. Even their actual plan, where the four disguise themselves as old men, is the kind of elaborate ruse you'd expect from spy fiction, not a real crime. Dedicated to this low risk, high gain job, Reinhard becomes the Expert and Lipka the Mastermind, and enlist the intellectually unchallenged Borsuk (Abrahamson) as the Coordinator and jock Allen (Jenner) as the Wheelman. Touring their university's library, they start up a scheme to steal the rare and kitchen-table sized The Birds of America, which they speculate could be worth millions on the black market. Into this neurotic muddle comes Lipka (Peters), a brilliant if chaotic athlete scholar who shares the same sense of ennui, if in a manic variety.

Reinhard (Keoghan) is an art student whose life lacks meaning and mopes philosophically about how art requires suffering. Also appearing in the film (as themselves) are the original four the story is based on: Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Chas Allen and Eric Borsuk. Directed by Bart Layton, it stars Irish actor Barry Keoghan ( The Killing of a Sacred Deer), Evan Peters ( X-Men: Days of Future Past), Blake Jenner ( Glee) and Jared Abrahamson (Netflix's Travelers). Based on true events (sort of), American Animals tells the story of how in 2003, four guys botched a robbery of a rare book collection from the Transylvania University library.

American animals eric borsuk