CHORAL HISTORY

“The Alto Knights.”

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

Robert De Niro plays two rival Mob bosses in Barry Levinson's film.

How might a mid-century New York City Mob boss spend his nights? Frank Costello, the acting head of the Luciano crime family, prefers to stay in, with his wife and their two adorable dogs. No guns and no molls, except the ones that pop up on TV, in a trailer for the 1949 gangster classic “White Heat,” starring a viciously leering James Cagney. (“It’s your kind of Cagney . . . in his kind of story.”) Vito Genovese, Frank’s sometime friend and longtime rival, is having a more eventful evening, overseeing the murder of his wife’s ex-husband. The violence is compounded by a redundant frenzy of crosscutting, double-underlining the difference between Frank, a man of domestic leisure, and Vito, a jealous and vengeful killer. The contrast is already night and day—or, rather, heads and tails. Both Frank and Vito, you see, are played by Robert De Niro.

This is the odd gimmick of Barry Levinson’s biographical drama “The Alto Knights,” his first feature in a decade. After working with De Niro in “Sleepers” (1996), “Wag the Dog” (1997), “What Just Happened” (2008), and the Bernie Madoff telefilm “The Wizard of Lies” (2017), Levinson has now cast him in a blood-spattered Mafia history lesson, unfolding in a wing somewhere adjacent to the director’s 1991 film, “Bugsy,” where Frank and Vito popped up in brief, surly cameos. The tribal codes and brutish hierarchies of Italian American Mob rule are well-trodden screen turf for De Niro; who’s to say whether he might ever tire of donning a fedora, sitting in vintage automobiles, or dropping jocular anecdotes and staccato expletives? It’s your kind of De Niro, in his kind of story, but with a high-concept twist.