In America, after all, you can be whoever you want to beand the people who don’t die trying too hard often end up with second acts as subjects of a movie, a movie like Casino Jack. At first blush, Abramoff might seem like a departure for him, but his last feature was Factory Girl, in which Sienna Miller played the doomed Edie Sedgwick, and despite its hipster milieu (and despite its outrageous depictions of Andy Warhol and a character intended to be Bob Dylan), it was an American story, too, in which people conjure up public personalities that have little relationship to good ethics or common sense or self-preservation. Hickenlooper was only 47, and he’d made an intriguing mix of documentaries, short subjects and fiction features on topics of American cultureand counterculture. It’s also a bit of an orphan, coming in the wake of Hickenlooper’s untimely death late last year. The new film takes a novel, comic approach, but it probably isn’t compelling enough to interest those who got their fill from the Gibney doc.

The story was ably retold last year in Alex Gibney’s documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, and now comes the dramatized feature, Casino Jack, directed by George Hickenlooper and starring Kevin Spacey as Abramoff.

Casino jack movie documentary