Bart Layton’s Crime 101 is a loving pastiche to Michael Mann’s vision of Los Angeles, and to Heat in particular, revolving around a literal highway robber, Chris Hemsworth’s James Davis, who is conducting a series of intricate diamond heists up and down the 101. To pull off these crimes and remain undetected, Davis possesses an exquisite knowledge of every facet of the highway, from carparks to exits to junctions; an augmented perception comparable to the contact lenses he finally takes off when he substitutes his car at the end of the film’s opening set piece. Of course, he’s against a detective, Mark Ruffalo’s Lou Lubesnick, who has a similarly preternatural sense of space, and who spends the first part of the film poring over the thirty blocks between the last known surveillance image of the jewel thief and the closest entrance to the 101. Lubesnick quickly develops the theory that the crimes are the work of a single operator, but the chief of police disputes this outlook, since some of Davis’ burglaries have already been “solved,” and so peremptorily informs Lubesnick that he needs a map of events that “suits the whole building.” A classic cartographic LA drama now ensues, as Davis’ capacity to cognitive map the highway is set against Ruffalo’s, with both men competing to “read” the city at its most mercurial.

With both men operating as lone wolves, there’s a distinctively Mannian sense here that everything is labour, everything is alienation, and all labour is alienation – precisely the point of Davis’ burglaries is to cement himself as an outsider, his goal a “number that makes him feel safe” (a classic Mann turn of phrase) from the contingencies and vicissitudes of society. A deep nostalgia for Mann’s romance of alienation, for the cold warmth of Mann’s mercantile workers, percolates throughout the film; indeed Lubesnick’s “lone wolf” theory of Davis is dismissed by his colleagues for being too romantic, too redolent of Mann. As with Mann, too, cars are both media of alienation and interpersonal exchange, with Davis’ sole romantic connection emerging from a fender-bender: “Maya, this is Mike, the guy you crashed into. I’m wondering if you might like to have dinner with me?” Cars also incorporate insurance broker Sharon Combs, played by Halle Berry, into the drama; she first meets Davis while they’re waiting at a concierge point, where he asks her to deduce the make and model of his car from his outfit and demeanor, and promises to hand over the keys if she’s right.

A large part of this nostalgia for Mann’s romantic alienation stems from the sense that it has slipped away, or has ceased to be distinctive in an America where precarity has become the norm. Nowhere is that shift in tone clearer than in the erasure of warm-tinted sodium lights from the Los Angeles landscape and from the film’s palette in turn. This is post-sodium LA, whose crystal-white light is enhanced both by the omnipresent use of SmartPhones and the cold brilliance of the diamonds that Davis has made his stock in trade. The artificiality of this light bleeds into every space, eroding the stark day-night dichotomy, and the profoundly romantic sense of the night as a third space, that made Mann’s nocturnes so distinctive. Here, it is always dim during the day, but that dimness is never quite noir, never quite approaches black-and-white, evoking an alienation that has cooled, lost its vital essence.

This leads Layton to expand the ambit of the film to two other Los Angeles coordinates that don’t appear so often in Mann: new age lifestyles and the oceans. The most intense car chase is bookended by yoga, beginning with Combs listening to affirmations in her car, largely oblivious to the volatility emerging on the road before her, and ending with Lubesnick meeting her in their yoga class, a recurring motif in the latter part of the film. Yet these new age vibes sour quickly once Combs is passed over once again for promotion at work, leading her to take up Davis’ offer of coming on board with one his heists; when they meet up again, he’s staring at a “Be Here Now” advertisement for Sunset Properties. Instead, it is the ocean that provides the film’s strongest sense of succour – all the action converges on the Pacific, as the three main characters, jewel thief, insurance broker and lone cop, attempt to liquefy the city and remake it in their own image. Combs’ signal to Davis that she is ready to join his heist is an Instagram photo of her feet in the waves, Lubesnick is separated midway through the narrative and moves with his cat into an apartment by the sea, and Davis eventually leaves his car for Lubesnick in a lot by the sea too. As these plot points come into play, heavy and uncharacteristic rainfall sets in over the metropolis, prefigured by the glissandoed reflections of traffic in the downtown skyscrapers.

It is here, in the third act, that the film returns to one of Mann’s tropes – what might be termed “eventual meetings,” the most iconic of which is the delayed linkup between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the closing moments of Heat. When Davis and Lubesnick finally meet, the film’s autocentrism reaches its peak; Davis is posing as a chauffeur, Lubesnick is posing as a diamond smuggler, they make conversation about cars, car films, Steve McQueen, Bullitt. Even when the disguises drop away they recognise each other as lone craftsmen, and equally recognize Davis’ difference from Ormon, a more violent jewel thief played by Barry Keoghan, at the behest of Nick Nolte’s “Money,” who catastrophically compromises Davis’ craft midway through the film, unleashing havoc on what was meant to be the defining work of his career: “I found it, I planned it, I walked you through it.” The film might end with Davis prepared to make it work with his car crash girlfriend, Monica Barbaro’s Maya, but the closing and defining note is, of course, the Mannian together-aloneness, shared alienation, and warm distance between the two men, crystallised by Lubesnick:  “You’re gonna get in your car, you’re gonna drive and never come back.”