Do the hustle

First, you have to deal with the hair.If you’re going to sit through David O’Russell’s sprawling long con of a movie, and actually enjoy it, you have to deal with the fact that it’s set in the ‘70s, with early Bowie, Paul McCartney and ELO on the soundtrack. And there’s a lot of distracting hair.

You have to deal with Christian Bale’s atrocious comb-over (he’s playing con artist Irving Rosenfeld in a movie loosely based on the ABSCAM scandal of 1978); you have to deal with Amy Adams’ twisty perm, and Bradley Cooper’s tight-curl perm; you have to get behind Jeremy Renner’s shellacked pompadour (he’s New Jersey Mayor Carmine Polito) and Jennifer Lawrence’s even bigger pile of hair as Irving’s wife, Rosalyn.

Okay? Once you get past all that, American Hustle is a highly enjoyable ride of acting, improvisation, camera bravado and minute detail. You may have to sit through the hair a few times to get all the plot points.

Irving works with mistress Sydney (Adams), who poses as aristocrat Lady Edith Greensly to help him fleece people looking to get loans they will never repay; Irving tells them the bank’s denied their non-existent application, then keeps the broker’s fee. The scam works, until FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) busts them, and offers only one way out: help the Feds catch four more scam artists, or go to jail.

Enter Mayor Polito, played by Renner as a basically decent family man who wants to put up casinos in New Jersey to put his state back to work. FBI man DiMaso wants to get him on tape taking a bribe, but Polito smells a rat and walks; Irving convinces him the deal will help his constituents, so he agrees. They become friends.

Next, a meeting is set with Florida mobster Victor Tellegio (Robert DeNiro in a cameo) to drag him into the sting — it’s a tense sitdown in which an FBI guy poses as an Arab sheikh to convince Tellegio they’re legit, and it almost works — until Tellegio starts speaking in Arabic! The deal almost falls apart, but DiMaso is so ambitious — and so coked up — he agrees to deposit $10 million in a bank to prove that the sheikh is legit.

Behind the scenes, DiMaso is working Irving’s mistress; Sydney/Lady Edith is working DiMaso; Irving’s wife Rosalyn is working Irving, and the whole thing is more confusing than The Sting, but in the right mood, more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

One guy who doesn’t sport crazy hair is Louis CK, the standup comedian who plays DiMaso’s FBI “mentor,” and begins to tell him a cautionary tale about ice fishing in Oregon that we pray he will finish. CK’s performance is as normal and sparse as his hair, and that’s good because American Hustle needs a good dose of normal. This is a seriously wacko movie. In addition to the cray-cray wigs, you have dueling male accents: both Cooper and Bale seem to be doing their own versions of DeNiro — Bale going for a lot of face pulling and head shaking, Cooper simply laying on the New York-ese and yelling a lot. It’s almost like a tribute to The Man Himself, but De Niro outguns them both in terms of pure scariness in his cameo.

Speaking of scary, it’s the two ladies in the cast who bring the most sparks to American Hustle. Adams plays her role so twisted, it’s got more corkscrews than her hair. This is another of her attention-getting roles, though mostly it’s in her eyes: the flicker of doubt behind everything she says, the possibility that she’s conning the con. And she seems to call the shots for her boyfriend, Irving, whose 50 pounds of gut fat and comb-over conceal a basically decent, loving fella. Check out when she tells him, point blank: “You know what we have to do now? We have to get over on every one of these guys.” Sydney’s not really a femme fatale, just someone who looks like her loyalties could shift in the blink of an eye.

But of course, Oscar winner Lawrence grabs the most attention in her smaller role as Irving’s voracious wife. With her piled-up ‘do, chain smoking and self-serving patter, she’s more of a hustler than the rest combined; yet she’s a smalltime hustler, someone who can’t think past her next manicure. And of course, director O’Russell can’t resist giving her another dance scene after it worked out so well in Silver Linings Playbook: this time she shrugs around the room, tossing her hair maniacally while singing along to Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die, crafting her next move. She’s a nightmare, and fascinating to watch. Traditionally, winning a Best Actress trophy makes actresses (for instance, Julia Roberts) chill out; once they’ve got one, they have nothing left to prove. Lawrence, though, looks like she’s still having fun, still has some tricks left in her bag.

There are nuances, especially in Bale’s work: he has the habit of talking very low, mumbling, underacting the way DeNiro once did in films like The Deerhunter and Godfather II. That quietness pulls you in, though the ridiculous comb-over and sunglasses can just as easily pull you out. Working with O’Russell again after the Oscar-nominated The Fighter, Bale manages to craft a completely different, sympathetic character.

Perhaps, though, we must admit that O’Russell’s work has taken on a certain Hollywood gauze. Though Silver Linings was a big crowd pleaser, there were some who found it way too calculating: stick in some football, some dancing, and wrap it around a meet-cute between two people with mental illness. As anyone who’s worked with the mentally ill will tell you, it’s never really a “cute” situation. Still, Silver Linings did feature a powerful acting ensemble, as did The Fighter, and O’Russell reunites most of his main players here for his most ambitious tale yet. There are a lot of Scorsese nods — the quick close-ups, the whipping cameras — and you know he’s going for something as substantial as GoodFellas. At the end of the day, though, you’re asked to root for two people who are scam artists. And to believe they’ll live happily ever after together is a stretch.

But O’Russell has apparently learned to ignore the tiny voices of “art” and “meaning” that torpedoed movies like I Heart Huckabees, focusing instead on the voices of character and story, which do make his art more accessible, if not completely believable. American Hustle is a completely wacko movie, but it’s the kind of wacko with a Hollywood ending.