Those qualities bind him, in a spiritual sense, to Lou, who can’t suppress a quiet admiration for the criminal he’s pursuing, and also to Sharon, the insurance broker, who is unwittingly drawn into both men’s orbits. She’s investigating a claim filed by Sammy Kassem (Payman Maadi), a jewelry-store proprietor who was robbed by Davis, and soon she’s sparring verbally with Lou over the specifics of the crime. Later, Sharon and Lou will have a friendlier run-in at a yoga studio—a cautiously deployed SoCal cliché and a rare coincidence in a plot where connections and entanglements are otherwise quite plausibly mapped out. One way to read “Crime 101” is as a savvy, moderately sardonic corrective to Paul Haggis’s “Crash” (2005), in which various Angelenos are forever crossing and recrossing paths in ludicrously contrived fashion, and every fender bender is a cry of rebellion against the loneliness of life behind the wheel. “We crash into each other just to feel something,” someone says in “Crash,” and “Crime 101” comes close to redeeming even that heavy-handed sentiment. An accidental rear-end collision is what brings Davis and Maya together in the first place—and their ensuing relationship, though not without its bumps, sends the story on some of its more pleasurable curves.
Watching Davis and Maya gradually open up to each other—their first date begins at a chichi restaurant, which they quickly abandon for street tacos—you might be reminded of the characters played by James Caan and Tuesday Weld in “Thief,” Michael Mann’s Chicago-set thriller from 1981. Layton draws even more visual and narrative inspiration from “Heat” (1995) and “Collateral” (2004), the two exhilarating crime dramas that cemented Mann’s reputation as the reigning poet of nocturnal Los Angeles. More than once, “Crime 101,” shot by the director of photography Erik Alexander Wilson, grooves on the transfixing image of a freeway at night, backed up in both directions: two slow-moving rivers of light, one white and one red. It’s an obvious homage, but it works. The vistas are hypnotic to the point of drugginess.
There are other aesthetic Mann-erisms on display: in the gunmetal gleam of Wilson’s images; in the score, composed by Blanck Mass, which supplies an endless, infectious line of jittery propulsion; and in the car chases, which are unfailingly realistic and, as a consequence, astoundingly forceful. (When a car flips over mid-pursuit, your response will likely be not a whoop but a sharp intake of breath.) Yet the film’s greatest debts are less stylistic than philosophical: “Crime 101” is, like many a Mann movie, about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of work. Davis, Lou, and Sharon all turn out to be detectives of a sort, each with a gift for quick-study discernment; they take an unmistakable pride in doing their jobs well and react defiantly when their employers fall short. Sharon, who’s spent years waiting to be made a partner at her firm, is repeatedly sidelined by corporate ageism and sexism. Lou is stymied by the matter-of-fact corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, to the point of not even being able to trust his partner (Corey Hawkins). And Davis’s integrity puts him at odds with his longtime fence, Money (Nick Nolte, nice and growly as ever), who responds by enlisting the services of Ormon (Barry Keoghan), a platinum-blond thug on a motorcycle. Keoghan, with his flinty stare and wiry physique, is reliably cast as agents of chaos, and as Ormon he unleashes a level of violence that nearly tears a hole in the picture. You want him to die the moment he appears. Ormon’s rage isn’t just scary; it’s messy, unhinged, an affront to the smooth professionalism and sneaky compassion that Davis, Lou, and Sharon evince. For Keoghan, the role represents both a homecoming and a reversal: he starred in Layton’s previous feature, the docudrama “American Animals” (2018), in which he played an amateur crook of a rather more cautious, morally conflicted temperament.