Rising star Michael Shannon makes a riveting shamus hired to chase a runaway husband in the quiet but resonant little noir “The Missing Person.”
Shannon’s bleary torment, not the slowly unfurling 9/11-scarred plot devised by writer-director Noah Buschel, provides the pull as the detective creeps behind his prey at the rate of approximately one martini per yard.
Pained by the idea that the guy he’s trying to capture might be a good Samaritan, he reaches for a moral solution to his gig. “I’d like to think you’re on the right side — the Serpico side,” a kindly fellow New Yorker tells him in sunblanched LA.
Buschel deals the bruised hero every card in the Raymond Chandler pack — trains, ladies sitting in shadows, brittle dialogue and sudden blackouts. In the end, the title expands to take on multiple meetings as Shannon (who earned an Oscar nomination last year for his freewheeling turn in “Revolutionary Road”) tries to pierce the fog he seems to carry in a cloud all around him. “So you make jokes and smoke cigarettes,” a lady in the murk summarizes. Yeah. Isn’t that enough?
Running time: 95 minutes. Not rated (drug use, profanity, sexual situations). At the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street.