Kelly Reichardt making a heist movie sounds like a contradiction. Instead it’s the best thing I’ve seen all year.

The Mastermind drops Josh O’Connor into 1970 Massachusetts as James Blaine Mooney, JB to everyone, an out-of-work carpenter and family man who decides, with almost no plan and even less talent, to steal a handful of Arthur Dove paintings from his local museum. Vietnam hums on every television in the background. Alana Haim plays his increasingly unimpressed wife Terri, and Bill Camp and Hope Davis are quietly perfect as the disappointed parents whose respectability JB is coasting on. Reichardt turns the genre inside out exactly the way you’d hope: unconventionally bleak, ironic, and funny-sad in equal measure.

Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score had me dancing in my seat, and it’s doing something sneaky too. It hands JB the cool-criminal soundtrack his life absolutely does not earn, so every skittering run of percussion becomes its own little joke at his expense. That gap between how the movie sounds and what we’re actually watching, a guy in a bad suit fumbling canvases into a station wagon, is the comic engine of the entire picture.

O’Connor is a perfect match for her. His scruffy aura pairs with Reichardt’s patience so naturally it feels inevitable, a man who reads as charming from a distance and hollow up close. He’s not a criminal genius. He’s a bored American who mistook wanting more for deserving it, and O’Connor plays every self-inflicted wound with this wonderful, oblivious optimism. She never lets him off the hook and never fully condemns him either.

Then the hilariously pathetic second half kicks in. The heist itself is over shockingly early, almost dismissively, because Reichardt doesn’t care about the job. She cares about the unraveling. JB on the run is one deflating episode after another, borrowed couches, bad haircuts, favors curdling in real time, each stop more quietly humiliating than the last, and it all builds to the most wickedly ironic payoff of her career. I ate up nearly every minute of it. The 1970s are absolutely her playground too. Christopher Blauvelt’s 16mm-textured photography is stunning, the costumes are gorgeous, and the production design has that lived-in, wood-paneled quality where every interior feels borrowed from somebody’s actual childhood.

What gets me is where Reichardt is in her career right now. This is a filmmaker in full command deciding to twist a genre for sport, and the surprises up her sleeve just don’t stop. I want her to do this to every genre. A heist movie where the real theft is a man stealing years from his own family, and somehow it’s the funniest tragedy of the year. Best of the year stuff. [A]