To an audience unaware of the true-life figure of Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read, watching Andrew Dominik’s directorial debut Chopper would be a lot of fun. It’s an excellent film, intelligent in its conception and assured in its directorial execution. There would be something novel about the titular protagonist, too. He’s something of an eccentric crook, by turns invoking pity, dread, and disgust. Not to mention very funny.

But to know ‘Chopper’ as (until 2013) a living person, watching the film is something else. It’s then a little beyond comprehension to know that he wasn’t incarcerated at the time the film was made, and he remained out of prison up until succumbing to cancer thirteen years later.

In the film, Chopper is asked by a journalist how he would describe himself, he responds, ‘I’m just a bloody normal bloke, a normal bloke who likes a bit of torture’. Then he laughs. He claims ‘the average bloke off the street’ has nothing to fear of him because he’s only ever tortured or killed members of the criminal underworld. Later in life, the Australian government paid him to lead an advertising campaign against domestic violence. He also made a living as a comedian.  

The concept of stranger than fiction gets thrown about a lot. I don’t think there’s an argument against its use in the case of Chopper Read. It might be tempting to call the man himself stranger than human. But by some weird logic, that’s not true, because Chopper Read is so incredibly human. And being able to capture that fact is what elevates Chopper to genius.

There’s much good about the film, but nothing is better than the performance of Eric Bana, as Chopper. Anyone who has seen the real Chopper on camera (and he was on it a lot) knows that Bana achieved something quite remarkable in his performance, from his mannerisms to his voice intonations and the subtleties of his unpredictable emotional shifts.

Bana spent time living with Read to absorb a lot of this, and to understand the man himself. But it’s odd that it was Chopper who singled out Bana (at the time performing in relative obscurity) to portray him. Anyone who has seen Eric Bana speak and behave out-of-character (or even in-character, in any of his other roles) might be baffled by the choice. But Chopper Read has genius of its own, and the casting was inspired.

The story of Chopper’s criminal life is told well by the film. Jumps are made between his early criminal career, in which he has little respect for any kind of criminal hierarchy, to his later life of crime, in which he is still very irreverent about who’s who in the underworld but makes his way sans his earlier larrikin fever. Be in no doubt, though, he’s still mad as a cut snake. And by this point in life, he’s been cut many times.

Ultimately, the narrative arc of Chopper transitioning from brash young wrecking ball to wary, respected hitman (and also a police informant) is not the substance of the film. The substance is a study of the man himself, the seemingly incongruous shades of his character.

The film does well to capture this in many ways but, in particular, its use of a distinct colour palette gives it depth. Scenes from earlier in his life are more brightly lit, usually blue. But the scenes of his later career are so often saturated in hues of gritty reds and greens. In their saturation, they give a sense that Chopper Read is immersed in this grimy world of violence, and they also emblemise and accentuate the emotionality of this man. He’ll shoot a man out of paranoia, he’ll show a strange loyalty to protect friends who have sincerely tried to kill him, and he will display genuine vulnerability at the possibility that his girlfriend might be kissing other men in her private life, despite being a sex worker.

Reading the real Chopper’s autobiography, it’s obvious that a very different film could have been made about this man, one more spectacular and violent. The book is worth reading for precisely those qualitities. But this is its own film, and Andrew Dominik his own author. With great sensitivity and skill, he offers us a very uniquely creative study a human. The psychic excesses of this man, Chopper, are dazzling, but the brilliance of Chopper is that it shows that we ourselves are only a manic step or two away from who he is. Some warming consolation is that, even still, people somehowstill like who we are.

A last word. This was Dominik’s first feature. A lesser known but more interesting fact is that, when Brad Pitt watched Chopper, he was so enamoured with the film that he reached out to him to talk about the possibility of collaboration. In 2007, Pitt played the titular character in Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It’s a good film, though not as good as the novel by Ron Hansen, from which it is adapted. But then, in 2012, the pair would go on to make the sublime Killing Them Softly, which far exceeds its literary source.

Dominik is not prolific as a filmmaker, and it would be fortunate if he made more films for us to watch. But his intelligence and consideration is clear, so perhaps time is the price we have to pay to wait upon the fruits of those qualities.