120 min | R | October 1, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A young Tony Soprano grows up watching his uncle Dickie Moltisanti run rackets in 1967 Newark while the city burns around them. The prequel knows exactly how this kid turns out. It just cannot decide whether it is a movie or a backdoor pilot.
The Many Saints of Newark is a prequel to The Sopranos. It follows Dickie Moltisanti, the gangster uncle who shapes a young Tony Soprano into the man the show spends six seasons dissecting. The story unfolds in Newark across the late 1960s, with the 1967 riots tearing the city apart and hardening the lines between Italian and Black gangsters. Tony stands at the edge of his own origin story. The real subject is Dickie, and the film argues that a boy becomes a monster by watching the men he loves act like monsters.
Alessandro Nivola plays Dickie Moltisanti as a man who confuses violence with tenderness. He commits brutal acts and then visits his imprisoned uncle seeking absolution. Michael Gandolfini plays teenage Tony with his late father’s heavy eyes and slow watchfulness, and he never tips into impression. Vera Farmiga plays Livia Soprano as a font of grievance, and she finds the woman who will one day try to have her own son killed. Leslie Odom Jr. plays Harold McBrayer as a numbers runner who decides he is done earning money for white men. Ray Liotta takes two roles, a brutal patriarch and the imprisoned brother who counsels Dickie, and he makes them feel like different men.
Alan Taylor directs from a script by David Chase and Lawrence Konner. Chase created the original series, and his fingerprints show in the dialogue’s rhythm and the casual way violence interrupts a dinner. The film is narrated from beyond the grave by Christopher Moltisanti, a character not yet born during the events on screen, and the device announces the prequel’s hunger to connect every thread to the show. The period craft is precise. The Newark of 1967 arrives in wide brown streetscapes, boxy sedans, and the orange light of a city on fire. Taylor stages the riots with real scale, but the camera keeps pulling back to the family kitchen, where the actual story lives.
The Many Saints of Newark works best as a character study and worst as a delivery system for fan service. Every familiar name arrives with a wink, and the film keeps stopping to point at the future. Nivola and Gandolfini give it a center worth caring about. The problem is structural. The film wants to be Dickie’s tragedy and Tony’s origin and a portrait of Newark, and it cannot hold all three. It plays like the pilot for a series that never got made, rich in texture and short on resolution.