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By Sandra Olmsted

Just as Network and Broadcast News indicted news media of their day, Nightcrawler revels in the underbelly of news-ertainment and its desire to win rates over reporting and analyzing the events of the day.

While Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), the main character of writer/director Dan Gilroy’s debut feature, sports a sociopathic, OCD-driven desire to make it in TV News, he real doesn’t differ from most of the successful employees at the bottom-feeding TV stations. He also spews business double talk and ambitiously grandiose business plans which vacillate between creepy and humorously close to accepted business practices.

From the opening moment of Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal’s Louis exudes nothing but craziness and desperation with his wild-eyed stare at a security guards watch and his cloying banter about wanting to be a security guard. While selling his stolen metal scrap, he asks the owner of the salvage company for a job, after a spiel about how hard he would work if he had a chance at a career. Unfortunately, the salvage owner doesn’t hire thieves. Louis, however, takes the rejection well.

Then, as he drives home, Louis encounters a car accident and freelance film crew getting bloody footage to sell to TV News. Instantly fascinated by this new form of scavenging for marketable goods, Louis asks the head nightcrawler, Joe Loder (Bill Paxton), for a job and gets rejected again. Still undeterred, Louis steals and pawns an expensive bike for a consumer video camera and a police scanner, and soon, he nightcrawls for best, bloodiest footage.

Smart and able to figure out how things and businesses work, Louis quickly learns the ropes and starts arriving on the scene before the police and selling to his footage to KWLA, the station with the worst ratings. Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the desperate KWLA overnight news director, throws ethics to the wind and buys Louis’ footage because “If it bleeds, it leads,” and his footage fits her theory about what suburban audiences want.

Next, Louis hires the homeless Rick (Riz Ahmed) for a low paid internship because Louis needs to take his video news business to the next level. Soon, Louis blackmails Nina into a relationship with him because she needs his footage to save her job. Meanwhile, Louis starts down the path of manipulating the accident and crime scenes to get the best footage and shots and then slips easily into making the news happen. Despite ethical questions, Nina buys his footage and pays whatever he asks, money and otherwise.

While Russo and Ahmed give exceptionally compelling performances, Gyllenhaal owns this film and his role. While he has played sociopaths before, Gyllenhaal makes a bid for an Oscar by going all out for this role. Not only does Gyllenhaal bring his best acting mojo for the role of Louis, but he made his body a tool to communicate Louis’ crazy desperation by loosing 20 pounds and working out obsessively to get the lean, hollow-eyed look and masters a disturbing glassy-eyed stare.

Louis, however, is more than a character, he’s a symbol of what is wrong in news reporting because Nightcrawler indicts newsertainment and some reporters and anchors’ desires to be the news. Nightcrawler is rated R for violence including graphic images, and for language and runs 117 minutes. Released by Open Road Films, the suspense-thriller and delicious satire Nightcrawler is in theaters Oct. 31.

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