Edward Norton’s “Motherless Brooklyn” is nominally an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel of the same name. But this hard-boiled, richly atmospheric tale of urban manifest destiny and malfeasance owes at least as much to Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.”
That book was about Robert Moses, the Machiavellian public figure whose vision and coldblooded ambition shaped much of modern-day New York. And if Moses isn’t a literal character in “Motherless Brooklyn,” he’s its chief bête noire in the form of Moses Randolph, played by Alec Baldwin in a performance that bears more than a whiff of his Donald Trump impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” Shifting Lethem’s time frame from the 1990s to the 1950s and creating a period piece with sobering political resonance, Norton has done what every self-respecting filmmaker must do when tackling literature: Throw the book out and make your movie.