David Mamet continues to provoke in thorny ‘Henry Johnson’

David Mamet’s critical cachet has been in free-fall for more than a decade. If the playwright, screenwriter, and director’s trademark ultra-masculine protagonists and staccato dialogue have been feeling increasingly creaky in the 21st century, Mamet’s politically volatile, often paranoid rhetoric has done him no favors, either.

These days, the once-formidable writer is more likely to pop up on a Fox News soundstage than Steppenwolf Theatre, and most of his positive critical notices have been reserved for plays he wrote decades ago. See, the raves for Mamet’s 40-year-old masterpiece “Glengarry Glen Ross,” which enjoyed a star-studded Broadway revival this year.

“Henry Johnson” (2025), Mamet’s first directorial work in nearly 20 years, shows that there’s still some life in his hard-edged characters and rat-a-tat dialogue, even if the more off-putting elements of his style are here to stay. The film concerns the titular Henry Johnson (Evan Jonigkeit), an attorney who’s dominated in discussions with other men in three scenes with increasingly dire consequences.

The first conversation, a fine scene with Chris Bauer, is particularly impressive, segueing from an abstract ethical parlay to a legal interrogation. It crackles with tension.

A second scene with an inmate played by the intense, committed Shia LaBeouf is no less riveting. Adapting his own 2023 play, Mamet stages his film with his trademark minimalism. While not quite as barebones as a filmed play, “Johnson” does little to obscure its theatrical origins.

The three scenes feature dialogue punctuated by extended monologues from Bauer, LaBeouf, and Dominic Hoffman.

The film’s best moments feel indebted to the language games of Tom Stoppard, or the symbolic agitprop discussions of Caryl Churchill’s late work, like “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You.”

Its weaker moments, which include a third scene featuring the actor Dominic Hoffman, could be less charitably compared to a circular argument on an internet comments section. Those wishing to avoid the specter of Mamet’s divisive, socio-political views may be particularly uncomfortable in “Johnson.”

The film opens a button-pushing and euphemistic debate on the morality of abortion, and it alludes frequently to evils perpetrated by powerful men publicized by the #MeToo movement. The movie’s perspective on these issues is sometimes willfully contradictory. The film and its characters view Johnson’s failure to intervene in the behavior of an abusive former friend who “had power over women” as a moral shortcoming.

However, Mamet’s choice to contrast the meek Johnson’s moral passivity with the aggressive and largely regressive macho histrionics of its other male leads has obvious indications towards the playwright’s fixation on ultra-traditional codes of masculinity.

The choice to cast LaBeouf, a dynamic and engaging actor with recently-settled allegations of domestic abuse, for a film whose subject matter deals so directly with violence towards women, feels like another provocation. Mamet’s textual (and, in the case of LaBeouf meta-textual) goading might amount to the thorny self-critique of an always-evolving artist or mind-numbing trolling.

The rewards in unpacking these contradictions will vary from audience to audience. But maybe, as LaBeouf’s psychopathic inmate Gene says, “Everything is as it seems” in a work like this. “All the cards are in the deck; it just depends on how you cut ‘em.”

Hank Nooney is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University.