If it bleeds, it leads: Nightcrawler remains a perfectly hungry, perverse L.A. noir

Even early into its theatrical release 10 years ago, Dan Gilroy’s 2014 thriller Nightcrawler felt like an instantly timeless classic. For starters, writer-director Gilroy’s startlingly confident debut made an immediate impression as an iconic Los Angeles movie, with immersive neo-noir vibes and unsettling chills bolstering its impeccable cinematic craft and rich thematic aims. It was an L.A. film that could measure up to the red-herring mysteries and anxieties at the heart of some Tinseltown all-timers, like Mulholland Dr. and Double Indemnity. 

Today, Nightcrawler sits high on my personal “Greatest Los Angeles Movies” list, alongside canonical giants like Kiss Me Deadly and Heat. Like those greats, Nightcrawler inherently grasps the grit, tenacity, and isolating character of its magically unorthodox hometown, lurking just beneath its starry surface. But this is only one part of the film’s enduring legacy, as Gilroy’s disturbing, meticulously constructed, and darkly funny noir has a great deal more on its ambitious mind than just getting the cosmic and sprawling feel of L.A. just right. 

Nightcrawler, first and foremost, unleashes a sharp-eyed satire on the media’s, and therefore, society’s, trashy appetite for bait-dangling, sometimes fake, news (an ever-relevant topic), served up a disturbing consideration of a certain type of white masculinity, and operated as a damning critique of corporate soullessness. These would be universal topics in any movie, but in Gilroy’s exacting hands, they fit L.A.’s imposing, eerie vastness like a glove.

The film’s thematic preoccupations are all anchored in Lou Bloom, Nightcrawler’s hollow and internally violent protagonist who would like to think that if you’re seeing him, then you must be having the worst day of your life. Played with reptilian apathy by a sneakily intimidating Jake Gyllenhaal in a career-best performance, Lou is a stringer—that is, a freelance news-gatherer. Except, even though the aggressive go-getter defines himself as such, “news-gatherer” might be a tad generous to describe the exploitative line of business that he is in. 

Snaking and speeding through the vastness of the billboard-filled streets, dark arteries, bendy hills, and affluent suburbs of the Los Angeles night, Lou films bloody, often unspeakably graphic crime scenes and car crashes up close, so he can sell the up-to-the-moment tabloid footage to second-rate news stations with a low-brow agenda. But Lou has only one client: the fictional KWLA 6’s news director, Nina (Rene Russo), who might be on the chopping block if she can’t deliver the ratings at, well, L.A.’s lowest-rated network. After Lou sells Nina his first piece of footage (amateurishly filmed, but sufficiently gnarly) upon getting the hang of the job through a chance encounter with seasoned stringer Joe (Bill Paxton), she tells him the film’s journalistic maxim: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

With its diversity of environments—a shiny yet grimy downtown enveloped in the midst of mountains, the ocean, highways, and various contained towns and neighborhoods—Los Angeles suits well-heeled clueless teens, broken-down private eyes and stuntmen, and corrupt cops and politicians as much as it suits passengers of speeding city buses, wistful starlets, struggling screenwriters, and drivers of all kinds. It also suits Lou. We know as much when we meet him on a nocturnal mission to steal yards of metal fence from a restricted area in the middle of nowhere. 

As apathetic as his tarsier-like eyes popping out of his bony, sunken face—Gyllenhaal purposely lost a great deal of weight “to make Lou look gaunt,” like a coyote—L.A gleams under the night sky, indifferent in its own sparseness to inconsequential people like Lou. Still, Lou clearly manages to get by. That much we know when he sells his stolen scrap to a construction foreman after a fierce negotiation. When he tries to land a job at the shady joint, he reveals his obsession with bleak, cliched business jargon. 

“People who reached the top of the mountain, such as yourself, didn’t just fall there,” he sucks up to the guy, who’s definitely not sitting on top of any mountain, or even a speed bump. “What I believe, sir, is that good things come to those who work their asses off,” he quickly rambles. “But I’m not fooling myself. Our culture no longer caters to the job loyalty that could be promised to earlier generations.”

He delivers his buzzword nonsense (stuff he learned online, we later on find out) so precisely and studiously that you can’t tell at first if it’s a robot talking, or it’s Patrick Bateman’s L.A. twin, in the body of a showbiz-raised Travis Bickle. Lou’s mechanical phrases—as hilarious as they are disturbing—only intensify in their frequency and humor when he undercuts his intern Rick (a terrific Riz Ahmed). “Don’t answer me by telling me a problem. Bring me a solution and then we can make a decision together,” Lou scolds him, eyes so wide you fear they’ll burst out of their sockets. 

It’s not that Rick, whose job is to monitor the police radio and take Lou to crime scenes as fast as possible through often perilous drives, doesn’t grasp that he’s being exploited. But he still accepts the lousy job (and the $30 nightly pay) out of desperation. As Gilroy subtly makes clear, Rick is homeless and hungry in a difficult town of hustlers and dreamers, with nothing more to offer than his driver’s license and knowledge of L.A.’s roads, willing to do anything to find some temporary relief.

But, where Rick is just game to accept a few small scraps to survive, the entitled Lou is looking to thrive (despite being equally broke, with his tiny apartment and history of theft). Steadily, this shell of a human shows us that no wrongdoing is out of bounds, so long as he gets what he feels he is owed. He is convinced of his own greatness and has lost all signs of humanity, empathy, and self-awareness in the process, just like the faceless corporations whose mottos he comically parrots. He’d readily watch you have a heart attack during an interview, and shake your corpse’s hand with a straight face afterwards: “Thanks for your interest in the position. Unfortunately, we don’t have anything that aligns with your skillset at the moment. But we’ll keep your resume on file.” 

No one who’s lived through the past decade could watch Lou’s actions without feeling the recently amplified sting of American corporate culture—a culture that continues to casually cut ties with loyal employees through generic emails, and makes getting hired (or landing an interview) so hard that people start hiding keywords in their resumes just to get noticed by algorithms. Sure, the claws of corporate America have always had a tight grip on the country. But with gigantic businesses controlling more and more aspects of our lives, Lou’s hunger to prove himself using such heartless talk feels even more disturbing in 2024. That unease intensifies through Lou’s escalating sense of male-entitlement-gone-psychotic, when he makes outrageous demands from Nina (including sexual quid pro quos), when he tampers with crime scenes and devises further disturbances and murders to film, and finally, when he heartlessly throws Rick and Joe under the bus to preserve his perceived power and bargaining position.

Gilroy was loosely inspired by a real-life crime photographer—Arthur Felling (AKA Weegee)—in creating Lou. But the most provocative aspect of this character isn’t his roots in a real reference point, but his rootlessness. Gilroy makes sure that we never really get to know who Lou is or where he came from. Instead, he and Gyllenhaal drop us into Lou’s car at once, creating a persistent sense of discomfort through the eerie unknowability of Lou. Gilroy fiendishly toys with that impenetrability day and night, giving us one-off glimpses of Lou’s depressing existence in his apartment, when he isn’t slithering around in the dark with a camera in hand. The visual contrast in Nightcrawler between its day and nighttime scenes—the latter was shot digitally by cinematographer Robert Elswit for budgetary reasons, an aesthetic departure from the grainy film of the former—comes to signify Lou’s two conflicting existences throughout Nightcrawler. The whole film is an indie with the polish of a studio picture, driven by dexterous tonal shifts and Dan’s twin brother John Gilroy’s zippy editing. (In that regard, Nina swiftly directing the live broadcast sessions and Lou and Nina’s many sex-adjacent newsroom exchanges are simply riveting.)

These all-encompassing qualities that invited both mainstream moviegoers and the indie crowd certainly helped the film to become a mini box office sensation in 2014—at a relatively small budget of $8.5M, Nightcrawler made over $32M in North America by the end of its run. Much of the credit also belongs to the film’s ingenious marketing, through which the film’s distributor, Open Road, inventively created social media accounts across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more for Lou Bloom, looking for a job. It was provocative marketing worthy of the movie it was selling. Nightcrawler closed the season with a sole Oscar nod for Best Screenplay; Gyllenhaal’s omission in the Best Actor race was staggering. That the statue eventually went to an impersonation—Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything—makes the snub even worse. 

But who cares what the Oscars think? 10 years later, Nightcrawler hasn’t lost an ounce of its power as one of the craftiest neo-noirs and mysteriously alluring L.A. movies of all time—sometimes, there is nothing better than a dark take on sunny La La Land that brings home the point, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Or, more fittingly its own version: “You want it, obviously. But how much do you want it?”