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      ‘My Little Pony: A New Generation’ Review: The Ponies Get Political

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      The latest entry in the children’s franchise pits an eclectic team of progressive ponies against a fear mongering demagogue and the prejudices of their communities at largeOut with the hand drawn-animated ponies, in with their creepily-anthropomorphized, digitally-animated brethren: the “new generation,” if you will, which includes not only ponies but Pegasi and unicorns from all over Equestria. This “My Little Pony” movie takes a contemporary spin on the franchise’s tot-friendly tenets of love and friendship by staging a political awakening about tolerance, prejudice, even fascism — sweetened, of course, with musical numbers, cutesy gags, and pastel vistas.In “My Little Pony: The Next Generation,” directed by Robert Cullen and José L. Ucha, earth ponies are anti-magic (read: anti-science) and prone to fear mongering. Except for our enlightened heroine, Sunny Starscout (Vanessa Hudgens), who crashes a demonstration led by, essentially, a defensive weapons manufacturer who profits from a community comically afraid of being attacked by other ponylike creatures.The panic is obviously unwarranted when a ditsy unicorn, Izzy (Kimiko Glenn), comes on the scene. Sunny whisks her new pal away to safety, unfolding a learning tour that shows just how silly and retrograde the beliefs cultivated by their separate communities about the not-so-scary “other” actually are.In search of sacred objects that might restore magic in Equestria, Sunny and Izzy assemble an eclectic team of progressive youngsters — including a tomboyish Pegasus and her social-media obsessed sister — while back in earth pony-land, Sprout (Ken Jeong), a crimson demagogue with a bleach-blonde mane, ascends to power.However generic (just this year, “Raya and the Last Dragon” depicted a similar treasure hunt geared toward bringing together diverse groups), the film’s messaging about unity and the need for a new generation to band together against misinformation and rabble rousing isn’t the worst thing. At the same time, parents might get a kick out of the film’s surprisingly unsubtle references to American politics — something to numb the pain of watching yet another “My Little Pony” movie, which the kiddies will demand whether you (or I) like it or not.My Little Pony: A New GenerationRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘I’m Your Man’ Review: Living Doll

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      Dan Stevens plays a dreamy, pleasure-driven android in this delightful near-future romance.“Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into” is a compliment most women would be disinclined to take umbrage at. But Alma (Maren Eggert) is not most women: A prickly scientist and cuneiform expert, she’s interested neither in flattery nor the man who’s delivering it. His name is Tom (Dan Stevens), he’s gorgeous, and he’s available. He is also a robot.Inspired by a short story by Emma Braslavsky, “I’m Your Man” is a cool and clever sci-fi love story. Alighting on weighty questions with disarming playfulness, the script (by the director, Maria Schrader, and Jan Schomburg) never overreaches. Alma is lonely, but not desperate; brisk, but not unromantic. (She sees poetry in the ancient texts she’s studying). So when she’s asked to test-run a synthetic soul mate in exchange for a donation to the Berlin museum where she works, she reluctantly agrees.More gentle and droll than joke-a-minute, “I’m Your Man” — like the excellent TV series “Humans” — muses over the barriers to human-android partnerships. Tom, like much of the internet, is algorithmically designed to give Alma increasing amounts of what she likes; yet her exasperation over these attentions is as confusing to her as to him. Flirting, we learn, is the most difficult skill to program, but adjusting for human cussedness must run a very close second.Edging now and then into the surreal, this unusual and tender little movie gingerly interrogates the gulf between digital and biological wiring. Stevens, speaking fluent German, is fabulous, giving the character unexpected depth and delicacy. Tom can quote Rilke and dance the rumba, whip up brunch and a rose-petal bath, but so what? He had me at those mountain lakes.I’m Your ManRated R for cross-life-form canoodling. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘El Planeta’ Review: A Comedy of Austerity

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      In this dry Spanish comedy, a mother and daughter commit to grifting as a full-time job.“El Planeta” is a Spanish comedy of financial errors that opens with a negotiation. Leo, played by the film’s director, Amalia Ulman, is a fashion student who meets with a middle-aged man to discuss her sexual rather than sartorial services. Leo’s coffee date lays out his preferences and kinks, and she names her price. Her date laughs in response. In their city of Gijón, Spain, he explains, oral sex might go for a cool 20 euros, not the 500 euros she proposed. In “El Planeta,” not even sex work can fetch a living wage.After her failed attempt to earn an honest wage, Leo returns to the apartment she shares with her mother (played by Amalia’s real mother, Ale Ulman). There is no food in the fridge, no bills have been paid, and neither mother nor daughter has work. Instead, they get by through grifting, donning fur coats to dine at restaurants where they’ve run up unpayable tabs. Leo is conflicted, but her mother is cheerfully committed to the scam regardless of the consequences. She reasons that at least in prison, the food is always free.This is a dry comedy that elicits amused recognition rather than belly laughs, and Ulman, as a first-time feature director, makes canny decisions to set a wry tone. The movie was shot in black and white, and music is used sparingly. Even when Leo and her mother present an appearance of opulence, with bespoke gowns and designer T-shirts, they remain visually trapped in a world of austerity. Like its grifter characters, “El Planeta” signals luxury but it does not luxuriate, creating an experience that is more intellectually than sensually satisfying.El PlanetaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Starling’ Review: For the Birds

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      Melissa McCarthy stars in this film on Netflix that takes shortcuts, at nearly every turn, in portraying the messiness of acceptance.A soppy, facile look at grief, “The Starling” finds its protagonist coping with the death of her infant daughter — and a marriage that has faltered in its aftermath — with the aid of a flapping metaphor.Lilly (Melissa McCarthy) is a supermarket employee who has channeled her anguish over losing a child into compulsive snack-food stacking. Lilly’s husband, Jack (Chris O’Dowd), has been living in a psychiatric institution. And a starling has taken up residence by Lilly’s garden. It keeps swooping down and striking her in the head.Starlings, explains a doctor named Larry Fine (Kevin Kline) — yes, like the Three Stooges, Lilly notes — are not easily scared away. Eventually, Lilly will learn that the bird is out of her control. She simply has to live with it.To be fair, “The Starling,” directed in bland, undistinguished terms by Theodore Melfi (“Hidden Figures”), never suggests that mourning is as easy or rapid a process as coexisting with a bothersome yard guest. But it does, at nearly every turn, take shortcuts in portraying the messiness of acceptance. Larry is both a veterinarian and a former psychiatrist, a combination that allows Lilly to economize on office visits and the screenwriter, Matt Harris, to dispense unrelated bromides from one character. (Larry also commits what seems like an ethical violation by visiting Jack without Lilly’s knowledge.)Blatant product placement, unconvincing bird effects and awful soundtrack selections all undermine a potentially wrenching, difficult premise with utter bogusness.The StarlingRated PG-13. Grief and animal cruelty. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Village Detective: A Song Cycle’ Review: Soviet Film Hero Emerges

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      Bill Morrison, the poet laureate of lost films, turns the story of footage found near Iceland into a history of a slice of Soviet cinema.The main title of this movie could be referring to two different people. The first would be Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, the avuncular hero of a banal 1969 Soviet film, played by the frequently avuncular actor Mikhail Zharov. Consulting on a case in which a musician, new to his hamlet, complains of a purloined accordion, Aniskin notes that the man does not yet understand the values of their small town.The other “village detective” might be Bill Morrison himself. For Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe. The values of his own corner of film revival place as much emphasis on ruin as on restoration. His astonishing 2017 feature, “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” unearthed an uncanny swatch of buried film history from the end of the line of the Klondike Gold Rush. Other films, like “Decasia” (2002), are audiovisual tone poems reveling in the beautiful rot of old reels in varying states of disrepair.Like “Frozen Time,” “The Village Detective” tells the story of a find. After a preface in which two films featuring Zharov, one from the 1930s and another from the early 1970s, conduct a kind of dialogue with each other, Morrison tells, in onscreen titles, of a 2016 email from a friend, the Icelandic musician and composer Johann Johannsson.On a trip home, Johannsson heard of an Icelandic lobster trawler catching a forgotten film canister in its net. We learn that the canister was picked up on the border of the tectonic plates that hold North America and Europe — the West abutting the East, so to speak. Underneath these plates is molten lava; the hydrogen sulfide emanating from that lava is a very high-quality preservative. Film preservationists in Iceland were practically salivating over the possibilities.What was found, and what we see, in mesmeric images transferred from celluloid that was steeped in mud, was the Soviet movie from 1969, “Derevensky Detektiv,” savaged by critics but a huge popular hit — so much so that Zharov continued to play Aniskin in sequels for the last decade of his career. He died in 1981 at the age of 82.As Morrison demonstrates through exhaustively selected clips, the actor’s story is also a, if not the, story of Soviet cinema. His film debut, as an extra, was in 1915, in a pre-Soviet film about Ivan the Terrible. He appeared in movies by important Soviet directors such as Boris Barnet and V.I. Pudovkin — and by many less important filmmakers. As he grew a bit stout in his thirties, he began to resemble the players of friendly-but-hapless supporting roles in American studio films. He’s got a touch of Alan Hale Sr., you could say.He did some of his best work in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” which got its director in hot water with Stalin. And when Zharov’s in-laws were imprisoned as part of the so-called “doctors’ plot” to assassinate Stalin (no such plot existed; the whole affair was an antisemitic fraud), Zharov was ostracized for not denouncing them.Morrison weaves this history into a treatment of Zharov’s 1969 star turn that renders its stodgy corniness poetic. (The accordion-centered score, by David Lang, is essential to this near-alchemical process.) The movie ends on a droll semi-cosmic joke that one expects its dedicatee, Johannsson, who died in 2018, might have appreciated.The Village Detective: A Song CycleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In English, with some Russian and Icelandic, subtitled. In theaters. More

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      ‘Undine,’ ‘My Zoe’ and More Offbeat Streaming Gems

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      From slasher musicals to water nymph dramas, we recommend a number of unusual films to breathe new life into your streaming routine.This month’s off-the-radar recommendations include a trio of terrific (but modest) indies from earlier this year, along with a thoughtful biblical drama, a wild slasher musical (yes, you read that right) and a documentary to fill that “Summer of Soul”-sized hole in your heart.‘Together Together’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu.The writer and director Nikole Beckwith opens her character-driven comedy-drama with credits rendered in a white Windsor font — unmistakable as Woody Allen’s go-to title font. It seems like a bold, even ill-advised choice, but it’s a purposeful reference; the flaws of Allen’s cinematic worldview are discussed later in the film, which can be read as a feature-length rebuke to the ubiquity of May-December romances in that director’s work. The relationship here, between a would-be single dad (Ed Helms) and his gestational surrogate (Patti Harrison), is much more nuanced than that, though awkwardness gives way to affection and even love over the course of the pregnancy. Beckwith dares suggest that such emotion can exist outside the realm of romance, and scene after scene lands with sensitivity and depth, without sacrificing any laughs along the way. Helms crafts his best film work to date, and Harrison is a real find.‘My Zoe’ (2021)Stream it on Amazon.Julie Delpy writes, directs and stars in this tender familial drama with an unexpected dose of science fiction. Delpy’s Isabelle is a scientist and newly single mother who is struggling to navigate through the minefield of conflicts and emotions tied to her recent divorce; both parents want what’s best for their daughter, but have vastly different methods of achieving it. What begins as a 21st-century riff on “Kramer vs. Kramer” veers into more serious territory when little Zoe (Sophia Ally) is struck by tragedy, prompting Isabelle to call upon her vast scientific knowledge — and willingness to experiment. Delpy writes about parenthood from the inside out, capturing its fears and presumptions with a vividness that borders on emotional brutality. But her gift for dialogue and mood makes “My Zoe” an ultimately rewarding experience.‘Undine’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu.Christian Petzold’s latest begins in the middle of a breakup, with the standard explanations and platitudes, until Undine (Paula Beer), the woman on the receiving end, says something you don’t typically hear in such conversations: “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that!” This is no ordinary romance, obviously; true to her name, Undine is a water nymph, and according to legend, when a man betrays her, she must kill him and return to the sea. But she’s waylaid by another, immediate romance, with (of course) a kindhearted deep-sea diver (Franz Rogowski), and complications ensue. Petzold is delving into the realm of magic realism, but with an emphasis on the realism; “Undine” is first and foremost a romantic drama, with the compelling intimacy and chemistry of its leads front and center, and the fantastical present mostly as well-drawn flourishes.‘Mary Magdalene’ (2019)Stream it on Netflix.Like “Ophelia,” from last month’s column, Garth Davis’s biblical drama “Mary Magdalene” repositions a woman into the center of a familiar tale, while simultaneously retelling it to a modern audience. Rooney Mara is quietly superb as the title character, carrying much of her faith and fear in her soulful eyes, and Joaquin Phoenix is a surprisingly effective Jesus of Nazareth, adroitly using his naturalistic approach to emphasize Jesus’s humanity and charisma. Davis and the screenwriters, Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, revisit the expected highlights — the raising of Lazarus, the conflict with the money changers, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection — but never present them as tableaux or pageants. Much like in Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ” (a clear stylistic influence), these scenes have an urgency and immediacy to them, as if they’re being staged for the first time.‘Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’ (2012)Stream it on HBO Max.The genuine end-of-the-world vibes of late — floods, fires, a mutating plague — might make this apocalyptic romantic comedy hit a bit too close to home. On the other hand, its underlying message of giving in to the insanity, and making the best of the time you have left, feels exceedingly welcome. Steve Carell is at his sad-sack best as an average guy whose wife abandons him the second it becomes clear that the end is near; Keira Knightley is charming as the neighbor who accompanies him on an impromptu road trip. The writer and director Lorene Scafaria, later acclaimed for “Hustlers,” makes an assured debut, orchestrating a top-notch ensemble cast with skill, and creating wildly funny comic situations that remain anchored in the story’s crumbling reality.‘All Good Things’ (2010)Stream it on Amazon.Those who eagerly followed the twists and turns of the true crime documentary series “The Jinx” should seek out this earlier dramatization of its events from the “Jinx” director Andrew Jarecki. Ryan Gosling stars as David Marks — a fictionalized version of Robert Durst — who leaves his life of privilege to be with his wife, Katie (Kirsten Dunst), only to become a suspect in her disappearance, as well as an increasingly bizarre series of unsolved murders. Gosling is given a tricky task, finding the humanity in a seemingly impenetrable character who may or may not be a murderer; and Dunst makes a good match, conveying how this sincere woman could have seen that humanity — and the price she paid for it.‘Disobedience’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.Sebastián Lelio narrates a sequence from his film, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams.Bleecker StreetRachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams star as members of a strict Orthodox Jewish community whose shared past forcefully returns in this powerful drama from the director Sebastián Lelio (adapting Naomi Alderman’s novel). Ronit (Weisz), estranged from the community, returns following the death of her father and resumes her romance with Esti (McAdams), who has repressed her desires and entered a loveless marriage. Lelio approaches the material matter-of-factly, refusing to either sensationalize or desexualize the relationship; it’s a rare mainstream portrayal of same-sex attraction that considers both emotional and physical attraction, on equal footing.‘Like Crazy’ (2011)Stream it on Netflix.Young romance is dramatized so often in popular culture that yet another story of lost love hardly seems noteworthy — but few are rendered with the kind of lived-in experience that the director Drake Doremus brings to this Sundance hit. Anton Yelchin stars as Jacob, who falls hard for the British foreign exchange student Anna (Felicity Jones) and must face the geographical and emotional difficulties of a long-distance relationship. Doremus and his co-writer Ben York Jones penned only an outline, working with their actors to improvise the dialogue, creating intimacy and authenticity in even their offhand exchanges. Yelchin and Jones convincingly convey their longing and desperation, while a pre-fame Jennifer Lawrence shines as a potential complication for Jacob.‘Stage Fright’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon.Fans of throwback horror will delight in this cheerful mash-up of “The Phantom of the Paradise” and “Friday the 13th,” in which a summer musical theater camp’s production of a “Phantom of the Opera” rip-off is disrupted by the troubled past of its leading lady, and the return of the bloodthirsty killer that murdered her mother. The writer and director Jerome Sable both embraces and sends up the conventions of Gothic horror and slasher movies, while convincingly staging the musical-within-the movie (and ensuring echoes of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” by casting Meat Loaf in a supporting role). Keep an eye out for the “Schitt’s Creek” star Daniel Levy in a cameo role.‘Mr. Soul’ (2020)Stream it on HBO Max.If “Summer of Soul” whetted your appetite for archaeological explorations of forgotten pop culture artifacts, this energetic documentary makes a fine companion piece. It concerns “Soul!,” a variety and talk program produced for public television from 1968 to 1973 — one of the first such programs produced by Black talent, aimed at a Black audience. As such, it showcased an astonishing array of musical stars, including Stevie Wonder, Al Green and Earth, Wind & Fire (whose awe-inspiring performances are excerpted), as well as prominent Black authors, intellectuals and activists. The show was the brainchild of Ellis Haizlip, who produced and hosted; “Mr. Soul!” is written and co-directed by Ellis’s niece, Melissa Haizlip, who captures the show’s history with a mixture of cultural awareness and familial pride. More

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      ‘Intrusion’ Review: We’re All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This

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      This domestic thriller from Netflix is painfully dumb and laughably obvious.In the simplest terms, “Intrusion” is about a woman who begins to think that her husband may be up to something sinister. The movie makes it immediately obvious, however, that her husband really is up to something sinister, because he’s always prowling around suspiciously, with ominous music playing pretty much whenever he’s onscreen. But this is a feature-length thriller, and it needs to buy some time and build suspense, so the faithful wife is obliged to be very, very obtuse and draw some very foolish conclusions. It’s an exercise in watching someone have the world’s slowest revelation.The wife is Meera (Freida Pinto), a cancer survivor and therapist, and the husband is Henry (Logan Marshall-Green), an architect who has designed the couple’s modernist dream home in rural Corrales, outside of Albuquerque. After their home is burgled, Meera surmises that they may have been targeted, and seeks answers by investigating Henry’s private life, which is both highly dubious and conveniently easy to look into. This is one of those mysteries where both the suspect and the sleuth keep making the kind of implausible, idiotic mistakes that generate trite suspense. Henry leaves evidence lying around with laughable carelessness; Meera roots around his office as he’s right about to walk in the door.If “Intrusion” has one redeeming feature, it’s Marshall-Green, whose performance as the husband with a dark secret has a crackling, tightly controlled intensity far more nuanced and persuasive than anything else in the film. Marshall-Green was similarly sensational in Karyn Kusama’s excellent thriller “The Invitation,” but the director of “Intrusion,” Adam Salky, squanders the actor’s terrific work. It’s tempting to imagine this material realized with the maniac verve of a film like James Wan’s “Malignant,” where the ridiculous verges on camp, instead of how Salky plays it: thuddingly literal and painfully dumb.IntrusionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Michael Gandolfini and the Riddle of Tony Soprano

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      In “The Many Saints of Newark,” James Gandolfini’s son takes on his father’s iconic role. But knowing his dad hardly prepared him for the work ahead.When Michael Gandolfini was filming his role in “The Many Saints of Newark,” a period crime drama that casts him as a precocious teenage troublemaker named Tony Soprano, he was having trouble sleeping and would stay up late at night, working on his scenes for the next day.Sometimes he would reflect on the motivations of his character, whose loyalty is torn between two paternal figures: his frequently absent father, a New Jersey gangster named Johnny Boy; and the film’s protagonist, a charismatic mobster named Dickie Moltisanti.In his efforts to get inside his character, Gandolfini would try to identify with Tony’s desire to please both men. He would find himself drawn back to Johnny Boy and repeat the wish to himself like a mantra.As Gandolfini recalled recently, “I was always like, ‘I want to make my dad proud. I want to make my dad proud.’”It didn’t take a psychiatrist to decipher what it all meant. “Of course that was something inside of me,” he said.Gandolfini is the son of the actor James Gandolfini, who played the menacing but undeniably engrossing Mafia boss Tony Soprano for six seasons on the revered HBO series “The Sopranos,” and who died suddenly of a heart attack at age 51 in 2013.The 22-year-old Michael has naturally inherited many of his famous father’s features. They share the same immersive eyes and smirking smiles; like his dad, Michael is soft-spoken with a salty vocabulary and admits to an occasionally argumentative temper.And when Michael — who was born four months after “The Sopranos” made its debut in 1999 and had barely watched the show before preparing for “The Many Saints of Newark” — thinks of his father, he does not conjure up Tony Soprano, the larger-than-life character. He remembers James Gandolfini, the man.He treasures good times they shared, grumbles about life lessons his father imposed, admires him as an actor and misses him the way any child would yearn for a parent taken too soon. “I truly wasn’t aware of the legacy of him,” Michael said. “My dad was just my dad.”Now as he pursues his own prospering acting career, Michael Gandolfini is consciously and irrevocably tying himself to his father with “The Many Saints of Newark”; in his most prominent film part to date, he is playing James Gandolfini’s quintessential role — one of the most talked-about and influential characters in TV history — at a younger, more innocent age.Gandolfini as a young Tony Soprano opposite Jon Bernthal as his father in “The Many Saints of Newark.”Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.With that decision comes demands — to fulfill an audience’s expectations and to meet his father’s benchmark — that Michael anticipated. But there’s an added responsibility he didn’t consider until he started making the film.“The pressure is real,” he said. “There’s fear. But the second layer, that a lot of people don’t think about, which was actually harder, is to play Tony Soprano.” When he stepped inside the role, Gandolfini said, “not only was it the feeling of my dad — it was like, Tony Soprano is a [expletive] hard character.”On a bright morning in September, Gandolfini, wearing a stubbly beard and a denim shirt, was walking through the Tribeca neighborhood where he’d lived as a boy: past the cobblestone alley where he’d learned to ride a bike and storefronts he visited after being given his first rudimentary cellphone, programmed with his parents’ numbers, at the age of 8 or 9.Though his father and mother, Marcy, divorced when Michael was 3, James remained a continuous presence in his life. Sometimes young Michael would tag along to neighborhood bars where his father hung out with friends. But more often Michael was doing chores his dad assigned him: “Mowing lawns, cleaning my room and getting $5 for it, going to shelters to feed the homeless and I would be grumpy about it,” Michael said.Despite the fame that his father enjoyed from “The Sopranos,” Michael said he showed little interest in the series: “I remember asking my dad, maybe at 13, what the hell is this? Why do I hear about this all the time? What is this about? He’s like, ‘It’s about this mobster who goes to therapy and I don’t know, that’s about it.’”After Michael attended middle school and high school in Los Angeles, he returned here to study acting at New York University. The craft, he said, called out to him not because it had been his father’s but because he wanted to see if he could do it himself.“I was craving an answer,” he said. “How do you do that — transform like that? Am I good? Am I not good? Am I going to get up and be embarrassed? That fear is an indicator that there was something that I wanted.”At a preproduction dinner, the “Many Saints” director recalls, Gandolfini thanked everyone “for giving me a chance to say hello to my dad again and goodbye again.” Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesBut in his first semester at Tisch School of the Arts, Gandolfini said, “I did feel a target on my back.” He was insecure and lonely, unable to find a community with other students and eager to mix it up with his teachers. (“I’m a bit of an arguer,” he said with a grin. “I find it fun.”)Instead, Gandolfini transferred to N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and, within a few weeks, had booked a role on the HBO series “The Deuce.” “It was a cosmic sign of a good move,” he said.Elsewhere in the WarnerMedia empire, plans for a “Sopranos” film were starting to come together. David Chase, the creator and mastermind of the original HBO drama, said that Warner Bros. gave him no restrictions on the scope of this film. So he and his co-screenwriter, Lawrence Konner, decided to focus on the show’s 1960s and ’70s prehistory — particularly on the character of Dickie Moltisanti (father of Michael Imperioli’s character, Christopher Moltisanti), who had been referenced on the TV series but never fleshed out.“We wanted to make a gangster film, more than anything else,” Chase said. “And we wanted to have a credible, believable, realistic member of La Cosa Nostra. And right there for the taking was Dickie Moltisanti.”The prequel story also allowed the screenwriters to show Tony Soprano in boyhood before he has committed to pursuing a life of crime.“We certainly didn’t want to depict him as the schoolyard rat or punk,” Chase said. “He was up to no good, in certain cases, even as a 9-year-old. But then, what boys aren’t, except the ones you want to beat up?”But as the filmmakers looked to cast the role of the adolescent Tony, they were unsatisfied with the actors they saw. As the start of production drew nearer, Chase and his wife, Denise, happened to be having lunch with Michael Gandolfini, whom they’d known intermittently when Michael was growing up.Father and son on a Jersey Shore family vacation in 2004.Brian Ach/Getty ImagesChase said he expected a boy to sit down with them but he looked across the table “and there was an entirely grown man.”During their casting dilemma, Chase said he remembered that lunch. “I just thought, that’s going to be the guy,” he said. “That’s the guy. It has to happen.”Gandolfini was not nearly as certain that he wanted the role. He knew it would require him to immerse himself in the life of his father, whose painful absence he is constantly reminded of.“I had spent so much time thinking about my dad, the last thing I wanted to do was think about my dad,” he said.Even so, Gandolfini agreed to an audition, if only in hopes of impressing the film’s casting director, Douglas Aibel, and landing other roles with him later on.To prepare, Gandolfini studied “The Sopranos” at length for the first time. Before, he’d only caught glimpses of the pilot, but now he watched the entire 13-episode first season, by himself, knowing it would be an emotional process. “It was hard to watch my dad alone and then having no one to lean onto,” he said.As he watched his father play the character, Gandolfini realized that his unique connection as a son had taught him nothing about being Tony Soprano. “Maybe I could know how to play my dad,” he said, “but I don’t know how to play Tony. I have to create my own Tony from my life and still play the things that made him Tony.”And he was utterly fascinated with the multifaceted Tony — “a character who will cry, become angry at himself that he’s crying and then laugh at himself all in one scene,” he said.Gandolfini was determined to assimilate the physical quirks and tics that he saw in his father’s performance: Tony’s lumbering walk and hunched posture; the way he bit his lip when he smiled and clenched his fists in his therapy sessions.After a weekslong audition process, Gandolfini came away with the role and a new appreciation for his father. “He so was not Tony,” he said. “The only insight that I think I gained was deep pride in him. I’m exhausted after three months — you did that for nine years?”Gandolfini in “The Deuce,” which he booked the first year he was also studying at New York University.Paul Schiraldi/HBOOnce Gandolfini won the “Many Saints” part, he realized, “Maybe I could know how to play my dad, but I don’t know how to play Tony.”Warner Bros.Alan Taylor, the director of “The Many Saints of Newark,” said he had some wariness about having Gandolfini try the role. “I’d never really seen him act,” Taylor said. “It was not knowing if he was up to it and not knowing if was the right thing, emotionally, to ask him to do. Because it’s such explosive territory to ask a young guy to go into.”But Taylor, who directed several episodes of “The Sopranos,” said he was won over by Gandolfini’s carefully prepared audition — and by remarks that Gandolfini made to his colleagues at a dinner just before filming started.As Taylor recalled, “He stood up and said, ‘I want to thank everybody here for giving me a chance to say hello to my dad again and goodbye again.’ From that point on, I never questioned it.”In the weeks before production, Gandolfini spent time getting to know Alessandro Nivola, who plays Dickie Moltisanti, as they went to diners, talked about life and watched “Dirty Harry” together.These exercises were necessary, Nivola said, because the film is so unsentimental in how it depicts the relationship between Dickie and Tony. “We don’t talk about how much we love each other,” he said. “So that feeling had to exist without our needing to put it in words.”Nivola said that it was easy to bond with Gandolfini over the important opportunity that the movie represented for both of them.“He being at the beginning of his career and knowing that he was going to be defined so early by this role that was originally his father’s, me because I was late in my career for a break,” Nivola said. “He was incredibly humble and told me, somewhat unnervingly, that he was relying on my expertise to guide him.”What impressed him most about Gandolfini, Nivola said, “was his ability to completely remove the sentimental, personal, genetic connection that he had to his dad and the legacy of the role and approach it forensically, the way that you would any other role that you were cast in.”With a chuckle, Nivola added, “You could say that kind of compartmentalization is the quality of a psychopath, but also people who are able to perform in these kinds of situations.”Jon Bernthal, who plays Johnny Boy, said that he and Gandolfini had spoken before filming about the burden they felt to live up to James Gandolfini’s standards — one that disproportionately falls on Michael’s shoulders.“He had talked to me about this mission he had been on, to get to know his dad better,” Bernthal said. “To try to fill the shoes of Mike’s dad, it’s an impossible task for all of us but especially for him. And Mike did that the whole time, with the rigor of his work and how much he put into it.”Despite their being from different generations, the 45-year-old Bernthal said he was surprised at how easy he found it to bond with Gandolfini as a peer and a friend.“His dad was my favorite actor and I think he’s striving enormously to be the kind of artist his dad was,” Bernthal said. “Similarly, so am I. We hold each other accountable to that. It’s remarkable that I can go to this man, who’s half my age, for advice just as much as he goes to me. He’s wise beyond his years and a committed and gifted actor.”Though Gandolfini has also worked with the directors Anthony and Joe Russo (on “Cherry”) and Ari Aster (on the upcoming “Disappointment Blvd.”), he is hardly a star and has enjoyed his low profile up to this point. But whatever reception greets “The Many Saints of Newark,” he knows his inconspicuousness won’t last long after its release.“I love my anonymity,” he said. “I get recognized from time to time and it gives me definite anxiety.” He said he still had a few remaining safeguards, though: “My beard helps.”As he steps into a world beyond Tony Soprano and the shadow of his father, Gandolfini also has a personal philosophy that is neatly distilled into a tattoo on his left arm: the word “faith” underlined above the word “fear.”Gandolfini explained, “You can live your life in fear and I mostly do,” he said, rattling off the self-criticism that runs constantly through his mind: “I’m not right for this. Don’t hire me. This is a bad idea.”He continued, “Or, because it’s all hypothetical, you can live your life with some faith that it’ll work out: ‘It’s going to be good.’ ‘I am right for this.’ ‘Someone knows what they’re doing.’”Gandolfini flashed a familiar smile and said, “If it’s not up to me, why not have a positive outlook?” More