Knox Goes Away

“I don’t know how you can unwind with that clock ticking,” Jerry Seinfeld once remarked to Elaine Benes regarding her customary “60 Minutes”-led weekend winddown. As it happens, the first sound we hear in director Michael Keaton’s neo-noir “Knox Goes Away” is a ticking clock, a sound that becomes as much a motif as Alex Heffes’s musical score. It’s less on the nose than brain-burrowing, and evocative of a main character suffering from a fast-moving neurogenerative disease virtually erasing him before our eyes. He is John Knox, played by double-duty pulling Keaton, whose contract killer occupation is riddled by this diagnosis. It’s not a new plot device, of course, evoking “Memento” (2000) in spots and Liam Neeson’s “Memory” (2022) in many more. The latter was a trashy thriller, no matter how much weariness Neeson tried to infuse, whereas “Knox Goes Away” elicits a surprising amount of gravity. Granted, it is occasionally muddled in its tone and narratively bites off more than it can chew, but there is a patience to its rhythm that I appreciated, and ultimately it transcends the gimmicky nature of its plot device. Time is running out on Knox, and as one of the most prominent champions of Keaton’s only other directorial feature “The Merry Gentleman” (2008), I felt myself mourning time running out on Keaton as a director too.

Though director Keaton does not do much with his Los Angeles setting, he sure knows his way around a dimly lit diner booth, as he demonstrates in an opening scene between Knox and his hitman partner Thomas Muncie (Ray McKinnon). In the actors’ air, you sense the characters’ ease in one another’s company and their shared history. So, when things go wrong on the ensuing job as Knox’s sudden mental deterioration causes him to forget who he’s supposed to kill, shooting his longtime comrade in a burst of his confusion, his offering that he didn’t mean it is as pitiful as it is poignant, giving this moment real weight. With the botched job and his declining mental state, Knox decides to cash out of the life and, as the title implies, go away until his son Miles (James Marsden) shows up at his door, pleading for help having killed the man who raped his daughter Kaylee (Morgan Bastin).

Though we know Knox has explained the finer points of his complicated exit strategy to another aging criminal cohort Xavier (Al Pacino), “Knox Goes Away” plays coy and never tells us exactly what it’s up to. If it is the movie denying us omniscience, in another way, it evokes Knox’s own plight, the struggle to keep everything straight, causing him to write down his plans as he goes along, a plot point that the movie refreshingly doesn’t pay off in the way you might expect. No, even as “Knox Goes Away” builds toward an inevitable twist, his fading mental state resonates. A brief scene with his ex-wife (Marcia Gay Harden) might be something of a set-up for later but it becomes so much more, an accidental goodbye, of sorts, in which the way he scribbles a note on a grocery list that isn’t his becomes isn’t just a signal of where he is now, but of the life he used to lead. Gay Harden helps invest the sense of a whole past life in the space and silence between them, and just as she scores in this small role, so does Pacino in his. Whether his character’s youthful girlfriend is meant as sly commentary on the actor’s own in real life, I haven’t the foggiest, but it feels buried in there, and there’s something kookily poignant in his own character’s aging, content to enjoy what years he has left in the bathtub with a glass of red wine.

As much as “Knox Goes Away” lingers in some places and on some characters, however, it doesn’t give as much to attention to Miles, or more crucially, to his daughter. There are hints of Kaylee’s deep emotional toll, like a scene at a restaurant where an unhinged Miles assaults a man who may or may not be looking at her where Keaton’s camera focuses on Kaylee as much as the attack. Mostly, though, she exists merely as a device. Her storyline’s grisly nature is also at odds with the police investigation led by Detective Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura). If Nakamura is effective in vacuum, her dry comicality seems to be taking place in a third movie, a police procedural send-up that never quite meshes.

Director Keaton also occasionally overdoes it with various effects to emphasize Knox’s increasing dementia where actor Keaton, frankly, doesn’t need it. The best moments are the quiet ones in the middle of Knox just, like, doing something, attending to the complicated parts of his scheme but getting caught in the middle of it not remembering and the quiet, delicate way Keaton imparts the sense of the mind going, of recognizing the mind going but not being able to stop it from going, the struggle to summon something so simple while also struggling to effuse the idea that everything is normal when it’s not. For as melodramatic as the story can sometimes skew, these little physical moments of acting, nevertheless, emotionally reverberate. And though everything story wise snaps into place, there is something impressive in the way a full-blown emotional catharsis remains just out of reach, the closing shot calling to mind the closing shot from “The Irishman” but looking through the looking glass the other way, as if the sum of us, the good, the bad, the ugly, can never, no matter what, truly be reconciled.