THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA movie poster | ©2025 IFC Films

Rating: R
Stars: Paul Walter Hauser, Walton Goggins, Shamier Anderson, David Strathairn, Brian Geraghty, Patti Harrison, Maisie Williams, Ricky Russert, David Rysdahl, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Damian Young, Haley Bennett, Johnny Knoxville, James Wolk, Lilli Kay
Writers: Samir Oliveros & Maggie Briggs, story by Samir Oliveros & Maggie Briggs & Amanda Freedman
Director: Samir Oliveros
Distributor: IFC Films
Release Date: April 4, 2025

An opening card informs us that the film is fact-based but fictionalized. Fair enough. An Internet search promptly reveals what happened with Michael Larson and the game show PRESS YOUR LUCK in 1984, so viewers can see what coincides with reality and where changes have been made for dramatic purposes.

In THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA, it’s May 1984. Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) initially uses someone else’s name to get into the auditions for PRESS YOUR LUCK. The show’s talent coordinator Chuck (Shamier Anderson) immediately pegs Michael as shady, but executive producer Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn) thinks Michael’s under-employed, small-town spiel makes him the kind of contestant that viewers will love.

PRESS YOUR LUCK play begins with a trivia round. The winner then proceeds to face a light-up board that offers a combination of monetary and luxury prizes, along with a money-killing Whammy. The contestant presses a big red button to try to grab a prize and avoid the Whammy.

After a few setbacks, Michael starts to win at the board – at a rate that the PRESS YOUR LUCK budget was not designed to support. The laws of statistics suggest that the triumphant streak ought to be impossible.

While the episodes are still taping, the production staff frantically tries to figure out what Michael is doing, how he’s doing it, if he can be stopped – and then if he should be stopped, because whatever the cost, his victories are generating ratings.

Director Samir Oliveros, who wrote the screenplay with Maggie Briggs, from a story both crafted with Amanda Freedman, keeps things propulsive and relatively suspenseful. What we’re in suspense about alters during the course of the movie.

Hauser, in addition to looking remarkably like the real Larson, gives a performance that makes Michael convincingly an odd soul, a sympathetic loser and a menace at various points. He elicits a wide array of reactions from those he encounters, and it is to Hauser’s credit that we understand all of them.

Anderson as Chuck is the closest THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA comes to an actual hero, and we root for him to decipher the clues. Strathairn smoothly presents Bill as alternately avuncular and snarling. Walton Goggins masterly captures the on-camera rhythms of a TV quiz show host and his off-camera consternation, and Maisie Williams is charming as a plucky network page.

The workings of network television circa 1984 are presented persuasively, so that we seldom find ourselves asking whether a particular detail could happen. One exception is when Michael strays onto the set of a talk show, a scene that appears intended to have more metaphoric impact than it does.

There are larger structural matters. Once we learn what’s going on – which is quite the discovery – the mysteries become less compelling, possibly because they’re easier for us to deduce.

One area where THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA comes up with its own trajectory is in Michael’s motivations. The actual ones sound pretty mundane (again, look up the real incident online), but what the filmmakers have invented isn’t especially startling, either.

Films of this type normally get wilder and wilder. THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA hits peak surprise midway through. It’s never dull, but it doesn’t build with the intricacy we might hope.

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