n the eleven years since that admittedly talented idiot Oliver Stone inflicted JFK on an unsuspecting public, the film’s legacy has only grown, though not in the way most of us would have imagined at the time. Instead of convincing the world at-large that there actually was another gunmen involved in President Kennedy’s assassination, the lapdog liberal director ironically begat a culture of creepy right-wing conspiracy theory reinvigorated by the failed FBI infiltrations of Waco and Ruby Ridge in the early Nineties. In many respects, we have Stone to thank for the “murder” of Clinton associate, Vince Foster, the endless pontificating about the Oklahoma City bombings (which, ironically, was carried out by one of their own), and, of course, The X-Files.


Ironically, in that pre-George W. Bush time, government mistrust was probably the least warranted it had been in half a century; it was hard to believe that the same inept government that was bombing the Chinese Embassy by mistake during the raid on Kosovo and arresting poor slob Richard Jewell had anything to do with something as devious as Foster’s death or diabolical as Oklahoma City. Frankly, the Cold War spooks were probably popping Prozac by the handful. But in the eyes of the American people, three decades of post-Watergate lies had planted a seed of mistrust in their brains, warranted or not, and for lonely, isolated Americans adrift in Middle America, it was easier to blame a faceless, bureaucratic government for their own inabilities to hold a steady job or make friends than to face the real culprit in the bathroom mirror every morning.


It’s that culture that’s at the heart of Neil Burger’s compelling, often fascinating Interview With the Assassin, which follows the last days of the mysterious Walter Ohlinger (Barry), a sixty-odd year-old man who lives across the street from out-of-work cameraman Ron Kobelski (Dylan Haggerty), his wife and their young daughter. Walter is dying from cancer and has told Ron that he has a terrible secret he wants to unload before he passes away. When Walter tells Ron his secret—that he was the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll on November 22, 1963—the would-be documentarian decides that this coolly detached old man with the requisite technical know-how just might be his big break.


And so Assassin chronicles the two men’s “journey to the truth,” as Ron and his digital video camera follow Walter across America to find the proof to back up his claim. Their travels take them from the safe-deposit box where Walter has hidden what he claims to be the shell casing of the bullet that took a president’s life to the scene of the crime in Dallas, and, ultimately, onto Washington D.C. Along the way, we meet Walter’s creepy ex-military friends, his dismissive ex-wife, and witness a whole lot of unsettling behavior, as Walter assaults off-duty cops, sneaks handguns onto airplanes and generally scares the shit out of the hapless Ron.


Of course, most of us would likely be scared off the minute, say, a would-be Kennedy assassin “jokingly” shot at our feet for the amusement of his buddy. But Ron, though frightened, becomes quietly and hopelessly addicted to being a part of the story. Even as he feels the need to arm his family’s home with security cameras, he becomes increasingly unable to drop the project. It seems the crazier Walter appears, the more tantalizing the story becomes for Ron.


The same goes for the audience. Though the film is clearly cut from the same faux-documentary cloth as The Blair Witch Project, first-time director Burger keeps us on the edge of our seats, masterfully unspooling the movie’s central mystery – all the while keeping things frighteningly believable. As for the evidence Walter presents, while none exactly qualifies as a “smoking gun” (har), most of it seems credible enough to the keep the story going, including an impressive retracing of the steps he took in Dallas on that fateful day and a ballistics expert’s determination that the shell casing, indeed, dates from around the time of the assassination. According to Walter, though, the real key to the mystery is finding his supposed superior on the job, the pointedly-named “John Seymour,” who the old man claims could provide the proof necessary to blowing his story wide-open.


But if the story is what propels Assassin, the heart of the film is Barry’s performance as Walter, which finds the longtime character actor quietly chewing up the part of a faceless loner capable of terrible crimes, not unlike the aging Nazi Ian McKellen portrayed in the underrated Apt Pupil. Walter was a role Barry was born to play; you could almost live across the street from him, with his Nowhere, America southern drawl, cropped haircut and two-tone Wal-Mart sunglasses hiding his intense, piercing eyes. It’s an astonishingly understated performance.


Still, from time to time, first-time director Burger paints with a broader brush than necessary, adding a few cheaply exploitive moments, as Walter bounces Ron’s daughter on his knee and poses for photos in Dealey Plaza with tourists (“That picture might be worth something someday,” Ron tells them, much to the displeasure of the mistrustful Walter). And the ending, a somewhat heavy-handed comment on the consuming and destructive nature of paranoia, takes the self-mythologizing a bit too far and tends to undercut what is otherwise dexterous, subtle storytelling.


Such criticisms, though, are minor in light of how genuinely unsettling Assassin is. We can almost see ourselves in the Ron character, as he’s drawn deeper and deeper into Walter’s world of paranoid delusion and things that go bump in the dark. Worse, he’s pinning his hopes on someone who, real deal or fraud, is a few cards short of a full deck.


And it’s their relationship and respective quests for notoriety that gives Interview With the Assassin its resonance – a road movie less about the final destination than the twists, turns and phone-tapping on the way there. In the end, Walter may be the crazy one, but in the Great American Tradition, we’re all losers in the eyes of God.