We seek holistic distractions in stressful times. This spring, I thought video games might prove some pacific force—but they quickly became a gnawing addiction rather than a casual pastime. Our old friend alcohol was fun for a while, until the taste of hoarded boxed wine grew sour. I’ve tried Scrabble, going for nervous mask-covered walks, I’ve even tried, on a few desperate occasions, to decipher those ancient artifacts I believe the elders called “books.” All to no avail. Anxiety and restlessness have still ruled the day since March, with only minor abatement. And so, it may be time to turn to more untraditional outlets, to seek out stranger medicines, peculiar poultices. Might, for example, there be some kind of tonic found in the sight of Tom Hardy trundling around a Florida mansion in a sagging diaper, firing off a solid-gold Tommy gun?

That’s an image on offer in the VOD release Capone (May 12), a brand-new, movie star-driven film from a director, Josh Trank, who was once supposed to be a big deal. From some angles, the movie’s profile is significantly higher than a lot of the other stuff made available on demand during the outbreak, and in fact the film has been spoken about—largely sight unseen, I’m assuming—as one of this warped year’s potential outsider Oscar contenders. Much as I’ve scrunched my eyes tight and squeezed my crystal, I cannot see the future—but it would be a sign of a truly, truly broken year if this hideous indulgence of a film gained any of that kind of traction.

There is, alas, nothing enriching about Capone. It offers none of the robust competence these dwindling-culture times are running low on. Perhaps more dismayingly, it’s not even entertaining. The film’s arresting oddity is fleeting, and then we’re just made to sit with it for another humid 90 minutes. Saying that Capone is a disappointment would sound overdramatic in any other year—what was I expecting, Capote??—but here in the barren lands of 2020, I must admit I was a little let down.

At least the Tom Hardy of it all should have been exciting, right? A madman actor of the sort that only rarely gets famous enough to have his pick of weird roles, Hardy most recently went wild in Venom, an absurd pleasure that gave the actor’s slobbering a playful quality: he was thrashing around merely to delight the kids and the geeks. Capone, though, is deadly serious. Hardy’s staggering illegibility is supposed to, somehow, convey something profound. At least I think it is, the way Trank somberly stages the film—with the musician El-P’s moody score groaning away as the camera prowls through syphilitic gangster Al Capone’s Miami Beach mansion. That grave comportment gives Hardy’s silliness entirely the wrong shading. What begins as a gonzo lark quickly becomes exhausting.

I’m going to say some things about Hardy’s performance in Capone that might tempt you to see the movie. Which is, of course, your choice to make. Just know that none of it is as amusing as it may sound. The best comparison I can make is that Tom Hardy playing dying Al Capone is as if Nick Nolte were playing the First vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s ghoulishly pale with glowing eyes and a gravelly, runaway mine car voice. He’s a monster, lurching around and mumbling like a desiccated warlock who only speaks Old Romanian unearthed from a musty tomb. Of course, he’s supposed to be Alphonse Capone, Italian-American from Park Slope, Brooklyn. But Hardy plays him Old World supernatural—undead and yet eternally dying.

The gist of Capone is that, in the notorious gangster’s last days, we see him reckon with the violence of his life as many around him—consiglieri, the family doctor, arch FBI G-men—try to suss out where some $10 million in hidden funds might be. Lost in a sensory horror of dementia, Capone routinely soils himself, chomps on cigars and later carrots, accuses loved ones and employees of being assassins, shoots an alligator. It’s a bitter, undignified last act, the once-powerful man reduced to an incontinent loon reeling around a fading palace. There’s a thematic intent there, I think: Trank (who also wrote the film) is attempting to show the ultimate banality of all lives. No matter how we swelled or raged in the prime of our being, we will be reduced to helpless nothingness by the end.

Which, okay, fine. But haven’t we seen this before? Specifically, hasn’t the fragile humanity of the tough guy, particularly the mobbed-up kind, been explored plenty already—most recently in Martin Scorsese’s poignantly wintry The Irishman, and most thoroughly on HBO’s watershed series The Sopranos (which now seems to be enjoying a quarantine-times revival)? What is it that Trank hopes to unearth that hasn’t been plenty dug up before? Capone shows little evidence that there’s any new insight to be mined from this particular world of doomed American outsider capitalism; all the lonely, poison men have been plenty diagnosed by now.

That leaves Capone to exist solely as an effortful acting exercise. Hardy certainly does a lot in the film, but that abundance is in service of little substance. Trank pulls back the freak show curtain; we watch Hardy briefly retch and growl. Then our Coney Island nickel’s worth has run out, and we head down the boardwalk in search of more lasting thrills. There in the dark, perhaps, Hardy has enjoyed himself—but it’s an inward performance, serving only his impulses and curiosities and offering nothing to us but a show of tics.

This is not the Trank redemption movie it’s been dimly whispered to be. Trank—who broke out with the tiny super-powers thriller Chronicle and then flamed out in the studio game with a disastrous Fantastic Four movie and a scuttled Star Wars project—composes some nice images where he can, but he otherwise cedes authorial control of Capone to his lead. All Trank can really do is limply corral Hardy toward some sort of conclusion, which barely arrives before the movie decides to end.

There are other actors involved—Linda Cardellini as Capone’s put-upon (and frankly saintly, all things considered) wife, Matt Dillon as a trusted Chicago lieutenant (I think?)—but Trank, and the film, have no real time for them. Hardy ungenerously demands all the attention. Starved as we are for big, exciting diversion right now, I won’t blame you if you decide to give Hardy that attention. Maybe you’ll see something worthy in the raving crypt keeper. Me, I’ll keep pressing on, trying to find something to really engage the mind during this enduring lockdown ennui. Perhaps it’s a testament to Capone’s ineffectual roar that the creature I’m now turning my hungry gaze to is a friendly dog called Scoob.

All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

— The Week the Cameras Stopped: TV in the COVID-19 Era
— Why Natalie Wood’s Daughter Is Confronting Robert Wagner About Wood’s Death
— Inside Rock Hudson’s Real-Life Relationship With Agent Henry Wilson
— How The Mandalorian Fought to Keep Baby Yoda From Being Too Cute
— A First Look at Charlize Theron’s Immortal Warrior in The Old Guard
— Back to the Future, Uncut Gems, and More New Titles on Netflix This Month
— From the Archive: How Rock Hudson and Doris Day Helped Define the Romantic Comedy

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.