Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn (2019) is Edward Norton's neo-noir, and you can watch it online on iFILM. New York, the late 1950s. Lionel Essrog is a private eye whose Tourette syndrome makes words and twitches escape him without warning — but nothing slips past his memory.

When his mentor Frank Minna is gunned down in the street, Lionel sets out to crack the case alone. Minna was the one man who once pulled him out of a Brooklyn orphanage, and the trail of his killing runs from smoke-filled Harlem jazz joints to the back rooms where city power brokers decide which neighborhoods get bulldozed. Norton plays the lead, alongside Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin and Willem Dafoe.

Norton chased this project for nearly twenty years, writing the screenplay himself from Jonathan Lethem's novel and moving the story back to the 1950s, where it tangles with the real demolition of New York blocks for grand construction schemes. A slow-burn mystery about corruption, race and a loner who notices what everyone else misses. Stream Motherless Brooklyn (2019) online on iFILM.