Surely the 21st century equivalent to the old Hollywood trope “Let’s put on a show!” is, judging by the movies that get made, “Let’s pull off a heist!” What that says about the evolution of our wish-fulfillment fantasies is a tad worrisome, so it’s refreshing that “American Animals,” which recreates and dissects a real 2004 robbery committed by a quartet of thrill-seeking college kids, grasps that there’s something singularly regrettable in how our popular art glorifies criminality.
And yet, for a good deal of its running time, writer-director Bart Layton’s slick, music-fueled assemblage of recreated narrative and documentary manages to be as deftly comic and suspenseful as the bank job movies from which Layton, and the incident’s perpetrators, took inspiration.