While writer-director Ramin Bahrani has continued to explore the dark underbelly of the American dream, he didn’t quite nail the shift from his acclaimed, gritty early films (“Man Push Cart,” “Chop Shop”), known for their casts of unknowns and shot-on-the-streets aesthetic, to 2012’s “At Any Price,” which suffered from the miscasting of Zac Efron as a hard-drinking stock-car racer in a glossy drama about failing farms.
With “99 Homes,” Bahrani finds the right mix of the two phases of his career to date, mainly on the face of Michael Shannon, who’s a known Hollywood quantity while also thoroughly believable as a Florida swamp rat who traded in his mullet for a shiny suit.