Review: Henry Johnson (2025)

The last time David Mamet directed a movie, Barack Obama was still wrapping up the primary season for his first stint in the White House. Mergers, known blockbuster IP, and the shift to streaming have made Mamet–inarguably the most influential playwright of the late 20th Century–a man out of time in Hollywood and Broadway over the intervening decade and a half. But it’s more than a coincidence that his public debut as a conservative-leaning intellectual a few months after the release of 2008’s jiu-jitsu morality tale, Redbelt, marked an abrupt, yet masterful, end to an illustrious career. 

Yet, even in such exile, Mamet has remained Mamet. He’s not refashioned himself as a red-meat faith-based flick auteur. Likewise, his reams of nonfiction since the announcement of his Great Awakening are three cuts above the typical pundit class conservative screeds. Such may explain why his long-awaited latest film, Henry Johnson, bypassed traditional distribution entirely, available only through rental from its website and potential theatrical screenings for those who request them via online form for their area.

Whether due to budget constraints or self-enforced minimalism, Henry Johnson is deceptively simple: an amorphous businessman (Evan Jonigkeit) experiences a fall from grace, which Mamet sets in three distinct rooms. To say much else would do a disservice to Mamet’s unrivaled mastery of language and plot. Amid the verbose chaos, Shia LaBeouf materializes to give a performance rooted in such menace and regret that it immediately cements him as a generational talent. 

Mamet has spent his career dissecting the drama of institutional groupthink whether on the middling college campus of Oleanna or the cruddy real estate offices of Glengarry Glen Ross (currently revived, by some miracle, on Broadway with Bill Burr, Bob Odenkirk and Kieran Culkin for the Trump 2.0 Era). But in the wake of COVID, Floyd, and the type of woke-scold furor that claimed the careers of both LaBeouf and himself, Mamet has directly leaned into the psychology of the weak-willed peons who’ve made it all happen. For Mamet, all the world’s a mob, and, as Henry Johnson proves, he’s still the one best equipped to dramatize the fruits of our dwindling moral fiber.

Henry Johnson is available to rent via the film’s website.