Motherless Brooklyn (2019) * * *

Directed by:  Edward Norton

Starring:  Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Ethan Suplee, Cherry Jones, Leslie Mann, Michael K. Williams

Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a private eye in 1950's Brooklyn with Tourette's Syndrome, which at the time didn't even have a name.    He knows his mouth and his brain do not always work in sync, and he blurts out things when he shouldn't.    Edward Norton resists the urge to overdo Lionel's tics and sudden outbursts, and we accept these aberrations as part of who he is.   They feel ingrained in the character, and less of a distraction to the story.  

If there is a story that doesn't need any distractions, it's Motherless Brooklyn.   It has the look and spirit of 1950's private eye dramas down pat.   Granted, there is a bit more plot and running time than is needed, but we remain involved in Motherless Brooklyn's tale of big city corruption and secrets among the haves and have-nots.   Lionel, who lives in a small apartment building underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, is clearly a have-not.    He works for a small-time detective agency specializing in garden variety surveillance on cheating spouses.    But Frank (Willis), who runs the agency, is asked to dig up dirt on a powerful bigwig and unearths evidence which gets him killed.    Lionel wants to find out why his beloved mentor Frank was killed, and finds the web he finds himself entangled in becomes harder and harder to escape.

Along the way, we meet the city's most powerful man, Moses Randolph (Baldwin), whose primary function is to uproot entire non-white neighborhoods and raze them to make way for parks and expressways.    The ruthless Moses doesn't let anything stand in the way of his work and, by extension, his legacy.   Lionel finds Moses is not easy to take down, and the conclusion is more of a truce between Lionel and Moses than a resolution of their beef.    It would've been less believable and more conventional if Lionel were holding Moses at gunpoint. 

Besides Moses, we meet Paul (Dafoe), Moses's ne'er do well brother who feeds Lionel information, Laurie Rose (Mbatha-Raw), who works for the center publicly opposing Moses' eviction of people from their homes, and has more than a passing connection to these events.    Thankfully, Norton wisely chooses not to make Laurie an obligatory romantic interest.    If you consider all that Lionel has going on, a relationship is the last thing on his mind.

There is more, and I won't reveal how everything dovetails, but Motherless Brooklyn is held together by a strong central performance by Norton and a lovingly captured a sense of time and place.