This stranger-than-fiction drama resurrects a hugely popular 1980s game show and the “luckiest man in America” who broke it. Featuring performances from Paul Walter Hauser, Walton Goggins and David Strathairn, THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA illuminates a forgotten turning point in television history, when a network executive took a gamble and inadvertently made Michael Larson (Hausner) — an obsessive ice cream truck driver from Ohio — into a folk hero. The film ushers us behind the scenes of Press Your Luck’s most infamous episode and speculates on Larson’s motives. With his unruly mane and beard, and his thrift-store blazer and khaki shorts, Hauser’s Michael is the embodiment of nerdy desperation, a man who’s banked everything on the chance to win the American Dream as millions watch.
“One can sense [producer Pablo Larrain’s] influence in the way it trades the usual biopic clichés for a dreamier, more subjective experience. As designed by Lulú Salgado, the Press Your Luck set is a claustrophobic maze of tight corridors, blinding lights and false fronts. Sound design by Andrés Velásquez periodically distorts the hum of electronics or the chatter of a crowd into a low rumble, as if some creature might be approaching from the bowels of the earth.” —Angie Han, Hollywood Reporter
