EXCLUSIVE: Movieline Has Your First Review of Kevin Spacey's Casino Jack

Next to Abramoff at any given moment is his right-hand sleaze, Michael Scanlon -- played by Barry Pepper, who, along with Spacey and Lovitz, provides one of the three terrific performances at the center of Casino Jack. If Abramoff is the cool-headed brains of the operation, Scanlon is its engine, drawn by Pepper as a sweaty, babbling portrait of killer greed who drinks red wine with ice cubes, fucks Lear Jet stewardesses behind his too-savvy girlfriend's back (Twilight series refugee Rachelle Lefevre), and is forever on the lookout for the next cash-generator to subsidize his high-flying lifestyle. ("You still haven't paid off your student loans," Abramoff points out, after Scanlon mentions he's just made a down payment on a multi-million dollar home.)

The two nevertheless enjoy a highly functioning partnership, speaking to each other in their own jittery, racist patois (the Native Americans they plan to swindle out of gaming funds are all "chiefs" and "monkeys"). Their crooked system works, somehow, and before long they become the toast of K Street -- "superlobbyists," the media dub them -- if raising the suspicions of the Post reporters they rub shoulders with at happy hour. As the kickbacks roll in, Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew, begins to fulfill his dreams of opening a private Hebrew school, and playing restaurateur. His wife, played by Preston, is highly suspicious; ultimately, her good judgment is clouded both by her love and devotion to her husband, and his mastery of sweeping the obvious under the carpet. Until a Madoff movie surfaces, this is the closest we'll get to understanding why Ruth stood silently by her man.

Endgame approaches with the shadiest deal of all: an attempt to buy a fleet of seedy cruise line casinos owned by Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, a Greek, self-made millionaire living in Miami. It's then that Jon Lovitz appears, playing Adam Kidan, a bankrupt mattress salesman with ties to the mob, who Abramoff lures into the negotiations. Lovitz, an underrated comic actor (see Rejections: CAA, above), turns Kidan into a lowlife gem -- a scene-stealing shlemiel who can elicit big laughs with nothing but a pained expression after a ballpoint-pen attack. Also doing superb work here is Maury Chaykin, offering a master class in character acting playing old school New York mobster James "Pudgy" Fiorello, like some overgrown, lugubrious toddler looking to flatten other kids' sandbox castles.

The film screens later this week for potential buyers. Spacey's award-caliber performance alone makes it a good buy, but Casino Jack has a lot more going for it than that. It succeeds, I think, where The Informant did not, painting a story of true crime and delusional grandeur in broadly entertaining strokes. But beneath the laughs lies a pointed and timely indictment -- not just of crooked, Bush-era backroom machinations, but of the scrupulously bankrupt avarice that would eventually topple our economy. It's a winner.

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