A different kind of Mean Streets — How Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon earns its epic runtime

One of director Martin Scorsese's earliest movie memories are of his family crowding around a 16-inch television. It was 1949 and on Fridays they would watch Italian films broadcast on the local station. The young boy noticed how movies such as Bicycle Thieves reached across oceans and generations, speaking to both him and his grandparents with universal truths. 

Nourished by his love of cinema, the boy grew to become one of the most successful American directors of the 20th century. He started with what he knew. Stories ripped from the alleyways of New York City and the characters he grew up with. 

But with Killers of the Flower Moon set in Oklahoma, the altar boy turned auteur is stepping far outside his comfort zone. As Scorsese quipped at an interview on stage at Cinemacon last spring "It wasn't an easy film to make. I'm a New Yorker. There were prairies out there and wild horses." 

The year is 1920. The oil in the ground has made the Indigenous families of Osage Nation some of the wealthiest in America.

The streets of Fairfax, Okla., are the inverse of the norm, with wealthy Osage couples flashing their furs and driving gleaming Pierce-Arrow autos down the main street while white butlers stand at the ready.

Into this topsy-turvy world comes Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, a simple man with an easy smile who loves money, whisky and women.

Injured in the war (nothing so dramatic, he was a cook), Ernest is taken in by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). King Hale, which he would no doubt remind you he prefers, is a cattle rancher and a self-proclaimed friend to every Osage. 

While Killers takes its time exploring the unique topography of the town, the film quickly centres on the union of Ernest and Mollie Kyle.

With a cocksure grin, Ernest offers the well-to-do Osage woman a ride. He talks about as fast as he drives, but Mollie sees him for what he is. Show-me-kah-see. Coyote.

But there are other wolves circling and a rising Osage body count. Based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, Scorsese punctuates the wealth and riches with brutal vignettes. An Osage mother shot beside her baby's pram. A poisoned man jerking his last breath on the ground. 

Between the bloodshed and the bedlam, Ernest and Mollie continue courting. King Hale has his own reasons to encourage them. The "headrights" of the Osage families — the rights to receive funds from the oil under their land — are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Soon Mollie softens toward her doting driver and he's welcomed into the family, though Mollie's mother, played by legendary Canadian actor Tantoo Cardinal, fixes Ernest with a withering stare.

While Killers has plenty of stars, Lily Gladstone as Mollie is a revelation. Holding her own with DiCaprio and De Niro, she anchors moments with a ferocious stillness.

DiCaprio, no stranger to playing wily characters, embodies this gormless gadfly with no moral centre. Add to that Robert De Niro playing a role with such gravity it's difficult to imagine anyone else in it. Behind King's cheerful smiles are eyes of cold calculation, cataloguing the debts he's owed.