The Greatest Leonardo DiCaprio Motion pictures, Ranked

This text was initially printed June 18, 2018. It was up to date to incorporate Killers of the Flower Moon, which is now accessible on streaming. It’s also possible to learn our overview and profile of Lily Gladstone.

Leonardo DiCaprio has been one of many greatest film stars for many years, but even if he grew up onscreen, earlier than viewers’ eyes, there’s nonetheless an unknowable high quality to Leo. Like many actors earlier than him, DiCaprio has spent a lot of his profession trying to upend our expectations of him — from matinee idol to grim poet to tortured soul — earlier than lastly settling into his consolation zone as maybe probably the most attention-grabbing, bold A-lister presently working. He has labored with Martin Scorsese six instances, in addition to with Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Baz Luhrmann, Clint Eastwood, and Danny Boyle — however the motion pictures all appear to be his as a lot as they do theirs.

With a profession like DiCaprio’s, it’s all the time a great time for a deep dive into his filmography. What struck us most: There actually aren’t any sleepwalking performances right here. Even when DiCaprio’s not nice in a film, he’s by no means not giving it his all, or selecting one thing for empty monetary acquire. An actor, above all, is the alternatives he makes — and few actors make extra constantly fascinating selections than Leonardo DiCaprio.

The film so anathema to DiCaprio that it wasn’t seen for six years after he and Tobey Maguire sued to maintain it out of theaters. Actually, it’s not price all of the fuss until you need to see a painfully younger DiCaprio attempt to act like a “spoiled Hollywood child” round a bunch of current and future members of his notorious “Pussy Posse.” (Author-director R.D. Robb was supposedly kicked out of the group due to this movie.) It is a largely improvised mishmash of each ‘90s indie-movie cliché, with a wholesome smattering of misogyny that borders at instances on MRA territory. All instructed, it’s extra embarrassing to Maguire than DiCaprio, who at the least appears to be making an attempt so as to add one thing. The most important hero right here? Jenny Lewis, in her closing performing position, who in some way survives together with her dignity intact.

The extra “severe” model of the Three Musketeers story made within the ‘90s isn’t essentially significantly better than the Chris O’Donnell model, however it positive takes itself extra severely. Promoted above its station owing to DiCaprio’s post-Titanic recognition, it’s a largely boring story that options DiCaprio as each King Lewis XIV and his secret twin brother, who encourage the musketeers (Jeremy Irons, Gabriel Byrne, Gerard Depardieu, and John Malkovich!) to return out of retirement to take out the evil despot. DiCaprio doesn’t give a lot of himself right here and, regardless of enjoying two roles, is oddly faraway from the proceedings, as if he weren’t fairly positive whether or not this was purported to be his film or not. The movie is simply too busy and loud to quiet down and be a lot of something.

Looking back, this romantic drama in regards to the doomed relationship between poets Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (DiCaprio) handily demonstrates all of the completely different qualities that the budding star would incorporate significantly better down the road: the dedication to enjoying a sophisticated character, the live-wire depth, the matinee-idol-with-soul attraction. That hindsight appreciation doesn’t do a lot to make Whole Eclipse any extra palatable, nonetheless. Director Agnieszka Holland and screenwriter Christopher Hampton original an deliberately distancing however stillborn love story between two depressing, self-destructive personalities who can’t dwell with one another but additionally can’t dwell aside. (Audiences didn’t a lot care, simply as long as they didn’t need to spend any extra time with both of them.) At this stage of DiCaprio’s profession, he might painting the bratty genius of a younger Rimbaud, however not the depth.

You may see what, on paper, might need appealed to DiCaprio about Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world satire. DiCaprio has achieved only a few comedies and should have been desirous to stretch these muscle tissue; local weather change, a serious theme of the movie, is the signature DiCaprio off-screen trigger; heck, Christian Bale acquired an Oscar nomination for McKay’s final film. However the match finally ends up being disastrous, and simply because it’s extra McKay’s fault than DiCaprio’s doesn’t save Leo from being the one we’ve got to take a look at the entire time. DiCaprio tries to floor his scientist character in a need to return to his quiet household life, however McKay by no means slows down sufficient for him to have an arc. As a substitute, DiCaprio simply seems as pained and flailing as all people else does, even when he does really escape with extra dignity intact than a few of the remainder of the solid.

The tip of the Leo Is Attempting Too Arduous After Titanic section of his profession. This Danny Boyle misfire made sense on the floor — well-reviewed e book that includes a lead who’s wrestling with sanity whereas making an attempt to outlive on a distant island — however in apply, The Seashore is a complete mess, with an unfocused DiCaprio efficiency and fussy, largely confused path from Boyle. (It’s not Boyle’s worst film, however it’s maybe the one he had the least management of.) This was the final time Leo would attempt to headline a big-budget film nonetheless wanting like the beautiful boy of Titanic; after this, his subsequent 4 movies had been for both Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. Boyle and DiCaprio, two artists who’ve achieved nice work individually, simply won’t have been a match. However, hey: You do get to look at DiCaprio struggle a shark. (This may be the final time DiCaprio would struggle a shark … to this point.)

DiCaprio doesn’t do message-movie earnestness effectively – he’s too shifty – so he’s a wierd match with Edward Zwick on this overly preachy and stilted “don’t purchase African diamonds” drama. Zwick is such a standard filmmaker that DiCaprio chafes making an attempt to interrupt out of the Reluctant Hero straitjacket Zwick places him in. That is the kind of position Humphrey Bogart would have performed 80 years in the past, and DiCaprio simply isn’t that sort of actor: He doesn’t have that type of unearned however simple cockiness, as a result of he’s too twitchy. DiCaprio’s not the worst factor about this film – which has aged extremely poorly, even when its message actually hasn’t – however it’s a job that appears to take a seat outdoors his consolation zone, and strengths, as an actor.

It should have appeared very thrilling for DiCaprio to play junkie poet Jim Carroll, to dig into the position of a drug-addicted wretch on the preliminary core of his dependancy. Sadly, the film — for causes that also don’t make sense 20 years later — performs Carroll’s story weirdly straight: There are occasions this seems like a film of the week about what occurs to good, younger, white prep-school boys once they mess with heroin, fairly than a piercing look right into a broken soul like Carroll’s. DiCaprio does his greatest, and also you marvel if he’d have been loads higher on this 5 years later, however the film is a floor have a look at a narrative with numerous depths. It confirmed that DiCaprio was keen to deal with ugly materials, however not that he essentially knew how or, extra to the purpose, knew the correct director to go down that path with him. But.

A uncommon industrial misfire for DiCaprio, Physique of Lies is second-tier Ridley Scott, which implies it’s appreciably slick with out a lot beneath. Leo performs a hot-shot CIA operative making an attempt to trace a shadowy terrorist kingpin by means of Iraq and Jordan. On the identical time, he’s burdened with a romantic subplot regarding a Jordanian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani) that’s meant to personalize a area’s conflicts however extra precisely serves as a manipulative plot machine as soon as she will get captured by the dangerous guys. A reunion with Leo’s Fast and the Useless co-star Russell Crowe, whose CIA chief lives a snug life again dwelling within the States, Physique of Lies is a bland but skilled piece of studio leisure that tries to be considerate about U.S.–Center East relations. Certain, DiCaprio invests ample grit and empathy into the position, however be trustworthy: This could be the one main film on this listing that you simply forgot he was in.

DiCaprio is an actor who works greatest with administrators who’ve sturdy visions of their very own, administrators he can problem and do battle with, all within the identify of a shared imaginative and prescient. Clint Eastwood, for all his abilities, isn’t this type of director: He’s a point-the-camera, do-a-couple-of-takes, get-home-for-happy-hour sort of man. This has its advantages, however it does DiCaprio no favors on this distant portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover. The film seems like a biggest hits of Hoover’s life, which by no means actually lets DiCaprio lower unfastened in the way in which that he likes to: His ache is muted, however not smoldering. (Armie Hammer’s acquired the juicier position anyway, as Hoover’s lover-protégé Clyde Tolson.) You may think about DiCaprio, struggling to get into Hoover’s head, wanting up in shock when Clint mentioned “lower.” Wait, we’re achieved? We’re simply utilizing that one? A lot of DiCaprio’s profession revolves round discovering the correct match as a director. Eastwood wasn’t it.

What a wierd time capsule of a film that is for a number of folks in entrance of and behind the digital camera. It was directed by Sam Raimi throughout his publish–Evil Useless, pre–Spider-Man interval, and it starred Sharon Stone proper when Hollywood was making an attempt to determine precisely what to do together with her within the wake of Fundamental Intuition. Not all that surprisingly, The Fast and the Useless by no means actually evolves past its gimmicky “It’s a Western, however starring a girl!” premise. The actors and filmmaker all appear thrown collectively for a high-concept hook that’s not very attention-grabbing past Raimi’s creative methods of staging one-on-one gunfights. As for DiCaprio, he’s completely high-quality as “the Child,” an ultra-cocky, super-charming gunslinger, however thank god he developed past these kinds of style throwaways.

That is nonetheless in DiCaprio’s up-and-comer interval, however it’s the opposite film from 1993, the one which wasn’t What’s Consuming Gilbert Grape. Tailored from writer Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life finds DiCaprio portraying a younger Wolff, who’s thrown along with an abusive stepfather (a veins-in-neck-popping Robert De Niro) in Fifties Seattle. It is a coming-of-age story, however it by no means fairly commits to it; the movie flirts with the concept the stepfather may really be making an attempt to assist the boy, earlier than promoting De Niro’s character out and turning him right into a horror-film villain. DiCaprio nonetheless wins huge factors for greater than holding his personal together with his De Niro scenes: You could possibly see the ferocity that was coming.

The primary of DiCaprio’s finally fruitful collaborations with Martin Scorsese is the weakest of all of them, with Leo within the “lead” however oddly irrelevant to the movie as a complete. It might have been tough for anybody to not be blown off the display by Daniel Day-Lewis’s mammoth Invoice the Butcher, however DiCaprio actually will get blown off the display right here: By the tip, Scorsese nearly appears to maneuver on from him completely. This was the lone Marty-Leo combo that seems like DiCaprio making an attempt to spice up some performing bona fides fairly than discovering the indignant, broken reality on the core of his character. After all, these two would get it proper finally.

Legit query: Has there ever been a terrific actor who’s appreciably worse in a Quentin Tarantino film than he normally is apart from Leonardo DiCaprio? Leo’s high-quality, one supposes, as evil plantation proprietor Calvin Candie, however the position isn’t a pure match for him. He’s extra of a bodily actor than a verbal one, and whereas he does what he can to exude menace, he’s arguably the fourth most compelling actor in his huge scene on the finish. (And having him spar with Christoph Waltz, who might need been genetically engineered in a lab particularly to recite Quentin Tarantino dialogue, does him no favors.) It’s a showy position, however perhaps just a little too showy, notably when Candie himself is so entitled and managed by others. It brings us no pleasure to say this, however DiCaprio doesn’t fairly work right here. Would this even crack the top-25 greatest performances in Tarantino movies? We expect not.

Leo’s first post-Titanic look was a cameo in Woody Allen’s caustic comedy about, you guessed it, movie star. Taking part in a preening party-boy film star who goes ballistic, DiCaprio has a blast sending up the inflated picture others had of his stardom, bringing intercourse attraction and real hazard to a probably one-dimensional position that may have solely required his pure charisma to get a number of laughs. “Aside from being handsome, he’s an amazing actor,” Allen would later say of DiCaprio, “an actor up there with the perfect of them — De Niro, Pacino — a terrific pure. He’s actual and filled with depth and a terrific improviser.”

Marketed because the reunion of Titanic’s doomed couple, Revolutionary Street marks the beginning of DiCaprio’s brooding bad-love interval, through which he performed a handful of characters who uncover darkness on the coronary heart of married life. (The opposite two movies on this class, Shutter Island and Inception, are larger on the listing.) The display adaptation of Yates’s debut novel can also be an important movie in DiCaprio’s profession in that it’s a part of a transitional period the place he was confidently shifting from next-big-thing to respectable severe actor, determining how his still-boyish seems might assist convey immaturity and panic in failing grownup characters. This high quality is on show in his portrayal of Frank, a Fifties husband who can’t determine why his seemingly storybook life with lovely spouse April (Kate Winslet) has left him so depressing. Pretty much as good as DiCaprio is, although, Revolutionary Street actually belongs to Michael Shannon, who launched his movie profession on the energy of a scene-stealing flip as a troubled native man.

DiCaprio is thrown in the midst of some true performing giants – Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro – and promptly steals the film out from underneath them because the trouble-making son of Streep, who’s coping with her dying father and a sister (Keaton) who has bone most cancers and desires a donor. The film is unhappy and simple, however DiCaprio upends it by maintaining it unbalanced, which prevents it from feeling as standard and theatrical as it could have in any other case. You understand by the tip of the movie that he’s not simply holding his personal with this solid: They’re in reality reacting, and responding, to him.

By director Baz Luhrmann’s outlandishly flamboyant requirements, this updating of Shakespeare’s tragedy is virtually genteel, however it offered DiCaprio with certainly one of his greatest early heartthrob roles, enjoying Romeo as only one extra seashore child whose head is on fireplace and whose feelings are leaping off his sleeve. At the start of Leo’s profession, he was particularly adroit at conveying the essence of what younger love seems like with its not possible highs, giddy infatuation, and irrepressible sexual urges. In Romeo + Juliet, he and Claire Danes have terrific chemistry, they usually’re so poignant collectively exactly as a result of you already know their whirlwind, fragile romance can’t final. DiCaprio would rinse and repeat this film’s grandly melodramatic method a 12 months later for just a little movie about two loopy youngsters on an ocean liner.

Contemplating all of the weighted-down-by-demons varieties that DiCaprio has portrayed, it was a blast to see him enjoying a flat-out bullshitter in an underrated entry in Spielberg’s filmography. Gentle on his toes and clearly having the time of his life, DiCaprio charms your pants off as Frank Abagnale, a teenage conman so expert at his chosen craft that you may’t assist however be swept alongside by him. DiCaprio well offers some heft to this rogue – a lot of this stems from his sad-sack, brokenhearted father, performed fantastically by Christopher Walken – and although the efficiency works greatest when he’s having a breezy good time, DiCaprio all the time permits you to see the scared child beneath. (Tom Hanks is his excellent foil on this means: He’s the everyman, the Frank Grimes, who can’t consider this child retains getting away with all this.) We’d like to see DiCaprio strive one thing this mild once more: When he lets himself go within the service of a terrific director, it suits him surprisingly snugly.

After The Nice Gatsby opened in Might 2013, Vulture author Kyle Buchanan paid particular tribute to the movie’s introduction of Jay Gatsby, saying, “It’s a scene that’s so over-the-top that it might need hit the moon, and when this magical second occurred onscreen, you had no selection however to chuckle, cry, or applaud.” For the file, we laughed and applauded: It’s one of many nice moments in current motion pictures through which a director (Baz Luhrmann) and his star (DiCaprio) are sharing one huge, understanding chuckle with their viewers. The entire movie is wrapped up in that second, and it’s why DiCaprio is so good on this remake, although the film itself is exhausting and misguided. As Gatsby, the unattainably spectacular man of wealth and standing, DiCaprio tasks the sort of movie-star wattage we simply don’t see a lot anymore, on the identical time hinting on the romantic duress that renders all his achievements finally meaningless. As in Superstar, DiCaprio performs into our flattering, envying notion of who he’s — and he has an absolute ball each confirming and sending up our glowing assumptions.

As a result of a lot of the eye this awards season has (deservedly) been centered on Lily Gladstone’s terrific efficiency in Martin Scorsese’s sobering portrait of the Osage Nation, it’s doable to miss simply how nice her onscreen accomplice is as effectively. Reality is, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest is that this epic movie’s brutally flawed major character, a seemingly nice-enough no person who returns from World Conflict I, falls in love with and marries Gladstone’s Mollie, and consequently helps to orchestrate her and her household’s destruction. DiCaprio has performed disturbed and wicked people in Scorsese’s movies earlier than, however Killers of the Flower Moon is one thing completely different. Ernest is a spineless buffoon, a grasping soul who needs to get pleasure from Mollie’s riches, acquired when her folks struck oil on their land, and is very happy to comply with his evil uncle’s (Robert De Niro) schemes to steal their cash — and, but, he really loves Mollie, by no means understanding how his keen to go together with the corruption could be hurting her. It’s a fascinatingly complicated efficiency of passive wickedness — of well-meaning complicity — and DiCaprio has by no means been so stunningly pathetic and loathsome, all of the whereas making you are feeling barely dangerous for this weaselly S.O.B. However solely barely.

That is DiCaprio’s All Is Misplaced, his Solid Away. Directed by Birdman Oscar-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, The Revenant is a brutal story of survival, through which an 1820s frontiersman endures in fast succession a Native American ambush, a bear assault, and a betrayal by certainly one of his companions (Tom Hardy) who leaves him for lifeless. Leo’s character is a person of few phrases, however in a narrative this primal, phrases don’t matter: The Revenant is definitely probably the most bodily position of his profession, the actor grunting, straining, and combating his means throughout unforgiving terrain to make it again to civilization. His Oscar win was one other instance of a well-respected actor getting his Academy Award as a result of he’s “due” fairly than for doing the perfect work of his life — which is to say, The Revenant is nice stuff, however as a result of the efficiency has an unrelenting jackhammer depth, it doesn’t comprise the sensible vary of his most indelible roles. Nonetheless, this can be the film the place some folks lastly cease moaning that DiCaprio doesn’t have the heft to play rugged characters.

DiCaprio’s greatest hit since Titanic, Inception is the primary actual occasion film he’s been part of since that James Cameron sensation. (Remarkably, Inception can also be his first summer season blockbuster.) We convey this up as a result of, frankly, a part of this thriller’s pleasure is that he’s the one on the heart of all of it, bringing simply the correct quantity of soulfulness and class to his position as a thief who infiltrates folks’s unconscious. It’s to DiCaprio’s everlasting credit score that he didn’t parlay his early stardom right into a string of lame tentpole flicks, and in Inception he discovered that uncommon four-quadrant thriller with ample smarts, emotion, and nuance. Dom Cobb isn’t a tragic determine as a result of he misplaced his spouse, however fairly as a result of he by no means got here to phrases with it, and DiCaprio offers the character with countless anguish that dietary supplements the movie’s gorgeous results and twisty sci-fi idea. Popcorn motion pictures aren’t his fashion, however he can do them fairly effectively.

Should you’ve watched Titanic lately, one of many huge takeaways might need been, “Good lord, look how younger Leo and Kate are.” As a result of each have blossomed into vital actors, it’s simple to neglect that they had been actually simply youngsters once they made this film — which, by the way in which, remains to be the second-highest-grossing film of all time. Even within the Terminator motion pictures, writer-director James Cameron had all the time had a aptitude for down-to-earth protagonists, and in Jack he got here up with a plucky commoner that DiCaprio remodeled from an immigrant cliché into a terrific romantic hero. The trick was that Leo was younger when he made this movie: Having simply turned 23 when Titanic opened, he crammed the character with the reckless abandon and cocky, wide-open optimism that may have made him catnip for a prim-and-proper upper-crust magnificence like Rose (Kate Winslet). DiCaprio would develop extra nuance as an actor as he acquired older, however by way of old style star attraction, this was his peak. When his character dies in Titanic, a world of impressionable filmgoers had been his for all times.

It’s simple to be cynical about actors enjoying characters with diseases or developmental points to be able to get Academy Award nominations, however DiCaprio’s first Oscar nod was no mere stunt. Taking part in Arnie, the youthful brother to Gilbert (Johnny Depp), DiCaprio doesn’t allow his character to be a easy, cute variation on disablement. What’s nice in regards to the efficiency is that Arnie is powerfully difficult, even infuriating at instances, the boy being such a handful that we perceive why Gilbert and his household are cracking underneath the burden of caring for him. That’s crucial: Moderately than ennobling Arnie (and subsequently coming throughout as patronizing), DiCaprio offers him a messy, lovable dignity that’s really extra humane. Plus, Leo’s chemistry with Depp was an early indication that the younger star might maintain the display in opposition to formidable abilities.

Among the many most divisive movies in DiCaprio’s profession, Shutter Island is an elegantly unnerving portrait of a person slowly shedding his shit. As U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels, who thinks he’s on the hunt for a lacking inmate on an island for the criminally insane, DiCaprio has to play his character’s psychosis straight, all of the whereas hinting on the horrible reality: He’s really a affected person himself, unable to just accept the truth that his spouse (Michelle Williams) killed their kids. Whether or not or not you want Shutter Island’s twist — we’ve argued earlier than that it’s really completely irrelevant — the movie is de facto about exploring the depths of distress and denial churning inside this man, and DiCaprio is electrifying in that particular perform, conveying all of the grief that’s consuming Teddy alive. Shutter Island is usually in comparison with Hitchcock motion pictures, which is suitable since Leo offers a efficiency that’s on par with Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, two earlier Hollywood stars who bravely went darkish whereas working with a grasp filmmaker.

The soiled secret of this DiCaprio efficiency is that it’s maybe his most heroic: Of all of the cracking-up main males DiCaprio has performed, that is the one who’s the movie’s ethical heart. Everybody else in The Departed is out for themselves, in a method or one other, however it’s DiCaprio’s Billy — a loyal cop who thinks he’s making a distinction whilst he’s collapsing from the stress of residing a life undercover amongst jackals — who really sacrifices for the larger good. And, you already know, lots of good it does him. (It’s telling what number of completely different adjectives we’ve had to make use of for cracking up and crumbling and collapsing whereas describing DiCaprio’s characters on this listing.) DiCaprio has the least showy position in a film virtually invented for scenery-chewing — however he’s the rationale the film works.

As you might have seen by now, 4 of Leo’s prime 5 movies are Martin Scorsese works. These are 4 very completely different performances, however they’re all terrific in their very own means, to not point out the purest expression of DiCaprio’s spectacular ability set. This, after all, is the newest one, the one which we suspect goes to age maybe in addition to any on this listing. DiCaprio is enjoying a really loathsome character (Jordan Belfort), however he performs him with such zest and go-for-fuckin’-broke gusto that it’s maybe no shock younger Wall Avenue varieties have ignored the subtext all collectively and simply taken this film because the story of a hero’s journey to the highest. DiCaprio’s unbelievable, begin to end, however we notably love how he by no means winks, by no means offers in a single bit that this man is a monster, by no means evinces something apart from absolute certainty that the world was made particularly for him to overcome, strip naked, and eviscerate. And let’s not neglect the good discovery of this DiCaprio efficiency: his complete mastery of bodily comedy. His drug-infused slow-motion meltdown wouldn’t be misplaced in a Marx brothers’ film.

Brad Pitt (justifiably) received the Oscar, however in some ways, it’s DiCaprio’s efficiency that’s the soul of Quentin Tarantino’s audacious, bold, and in addition fairly unhappy ode to a misplaced age of Los Angeles. DiCaprio didn’t fairly nail his Tarantino debut as Calvin Candie in Django Unchained, however he’s excellent right here, in some ways as a result of his Rick Dalton seems like certainly one of his most really private roles: The previous Teen Beat idol who strove to be taken severely now performs a person who can’t assist however fear that his greatest days are behind him … and struggles with a world that may have moved on with out him. There’s one thing unusually susceptible, real, about DiCaprio right here that isn’t simply new for him, but additionally for his director. Additionally, let’s not neglect how legitimately humorous DiCaprio is on this film: It’s really pleasant simply to look at him drunkenly float round a pool. And, yeah: It seems he’s gangbusters with a flamethrower.

A number of of Leonardo DiCaprio’s greatest performances subvert or tweak his attractiveness, encouraging us to see the uglier, messier undercurrents beneath his characters’ interesting floor. By no means was that more true than on this Oscar-nominated biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. Leo’s efficiency as Howard Hughes was arduous to completely grasp on the time — he was nonetheless shaking off the final vestiges of post-Titanic teen heartthrob — however right here was the place he actually established himself as a serious grownup actor, bringing to life Hughes’s fiery competitiveness in addition to the more and more erratic habits that may be his undoing. His Hughes is a towering determine as a result of we all know he’s doomed — and, on some degree, we sense he does, too — however DiCaprio frequently pushes again in opposition to the eccentric’s demons, within the course of delivering a hypnotic, unusually heroic portrait of ambition in battle with psychological collapse. There’s one thing quintessentially American about The Aviator, how we hold striving for greatness whilst all the pieces is crumbling round us; casting certainly one of our most photogenic younger actors to embody all that was a grasp stroke on Scorsese’s half. DiCaprio rewarded him with an astounding portrayal that’s powered by a central irony: He got here into his personal by enjoying a person who was coming aside.