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On his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom,” the Democratic governor of California has made it a goal to rigorously engage with the opposition. But he is acceding, appeasing, as he nods and “mm-hmm”s in response to guests such as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro, ideologues who come on the show to discuss the machinations of MAGA. And so the podcast’s producers, perhaps intuiting that the dialogue experiment with conservatives is failing, occasionally slot in friendlier agents of power, Hollywood types, with whom Newsom can discuss the finer points of things like tax incentives to film in the state of California.

Last summer, Newsom interviewed the television producer and showrunner Ryan Murphy, a beneficiary of the California Film Commission’s tax-credit program. Showrunner is a scant identifier for Murphy, who, next to Taylor Sheridan and possibly Tyler Perry, cuts, rather, the figure of a streaming imperialist, endlessly iterating formulaic soaps about gender and power in the country. On the podcast, Newsom asked Murphy about the upcoming entrant in his “Love Story” anthology series—there are also the “American Crime Story” and “American Horror Stories” series—which would detail the relationship of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette, America’s son and his bride, who died in a plane crash just off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, in 1999. The two were cremated and had their ashes scattered in the Atlantic, an unreachable grave site, which intensified the irrational feeling that the couple had disappeared on some journey—where to, we don’t know.

At one point during the interview, Newsom brings up Jack Schlossberg, the thirty-three-year-old son of Caroline Kennedy, J.F.K., Jr.,’s sister. Murphy can barely conceal his resentment of what he perceives as a sort of aristocratic entitlement. The public found the adult Schlossberg during the pandemic years, seizing on his Instagram, where he proved himself to be completely literate in the language of internet absurdism. His wise-clown personality came as a shock, in part because of the legion of mythologized men he resembled. He skewered the veneration of his own family, too, later asking his followers on X whether Usha Vance, the Second Lady, was “hotter” than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his grandmother. The line crossed, the kid cowed, he was now getting more serious, acting like the scion in the headlines. (He is now running for Congress in New York.) After “Love Story” was announced, Schlossberg accused Murphy of profiting off his family’s tragedy “in a grotesque way.” Murphy’s response, on Newsom’s podcast, was amazingly mean. He thought it was an “odd choice to be mad about your relative that you really don’t remember.” Afterward, Schlossberg exploded, citing childhood memories of his uncle—the given nickname of Jackolantern; his uncle driving a Pontiac convertible and picking him up from school.

Ownership of the Kennedy story is a war with many combatants. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, Jacqueline, alert with a widow’s sense of history management, spun in Life magazine the myth of Camelot. The tabloids go occult, explaining death after death through the logic of the Kennedy curse. The family’s confidants, real and imagined, insist on both their normalcy and their otherworldly grace. The gossips leak letters indicating the family’s ruthlessness. The aesthetes (the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, the director Pablo Larraín) expel the Kennedy men from consideration, focussing instead on Jackie, with her scarlet letter “O.” Of the hagiographers, the dozens of them, the story is Greek tragedy, the hero fated to doom, a narrative lifted from Robert F. Kennedy himself, famous reciter of Aeschylus in grief at the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., just two months before his own assassination. The critical biographers, perhaps none as trenchantly as Garry Wills, the author of “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” published in 1982, remind us that, as Attorney General during his brother’s Administration, Robert Kennedy gave the green light for J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap King’s phones. The credo of politics without values that was forged: the Wills strain of psychoanalytic history, beginning with a deep reading of Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch, an Irish Catholic who makes a fortune pooling stocks and then works out his reprisal against the Boston Brahmin class that rejected him through his relentless elevation of his sons—this is not the story that sticks.

The book cited as the source for Murphy’s new series—Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy”—was published in 2024. What’s the reason for this one? In the scrum of literature about the Kennedys and their satellites, the wives, saddled with the heavy work of making the family grow, Beller’s book is guileless. Its premise is that Bessette, an outsider in the family, deserves for her reputation to be reclaimed. It’s a corrective spree: she was not a Wasp from Greenwich; she and her two sisters were raised Catholic by their single mother, an Italian American, in White Plains. The move to Connecticut came later, and Bessette also worked throughout her teen-age years. According to Beller, Bessette’s relationship with J.F.K., Jr.—which was often depicted in the press as tumultuous, with the tabloids marking Bessette as a vixen, an opportunist, a bitch—had its ordinary stresses magnified by the swarm of paparazzi around the couple, a form of stalking that destroyed Bessette’s mental health. Nearly every source—the schoolteacher, the childhood classmate, the colleague at Calvin Klein, where she eventually worked—praises Bessette as unnaturally gorgeous, socially canny, quick-witted, generous, compassionate, etc. Hounded by the tabloids in New York City, hazed by the Kennedys at the compound in Hyannis, she was in agony at the end of her life, Beller posits, having relinquished her agency to meet the burden of being loved by John and the hellish public scrutiny that came with his affection. In sum, he Beller biography gives Bessette the familiar Princess Diana interpretive treatment.

Schlossberg was not by any means alone in shading the Murphy show while it was in production. C.B.K., as she is called, is the love object of a posthumous legion of admirers. They are more than admirers, though. They are custodians of the myth. Bessette refused the profile at Vogue or Harper’s; the custodians do not have a lot of material to work with. But they’ve done plenty of work anyway, and what makes Beller’s book seem belated—gratuitous—is the already well-established, loosely connected school of bloggers, mimics, and lay analysts of Bessette’s public footprint, namely her minimalist nineties style. Their Bessette is a creature of photography. Even in the famous paparazzi shots of Bessette and J.F.K., Jr., squabbling in Washington Square Park, they see an opportunity for aesthetic analysis. The scan of the proportion of the camel-colored pencil skirt, the break on the bootleg jean, the wear on the spazzolato bag—these have all become points for divining the intelligence and savvy of Bessette. Most anachronistically, some recruit Bessette as an avatar for so-called quiet luxury and clean-girl aesthetics, recent trends that are expressions not of individual personality but of discernment and discipline turned menacingly inward. And so the custodians became irate when photographs emerged of the actor Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette in Murphy’s show, looking all wrong on set. The chief affront was the hair: too yellow, far from C.B.K.’s ice-blond. The critiques were heard, Murphy told Newsom; Pidgeon, a brunette then wearing a wig, was ultimately forced to bleach. “Bessette is loved as a mute,” a friend summarized to me over drinks, the other night.

The show had its première party in New York City in early February. The Times’ Styles section did its glossy treatment of the night, which struck a familiar tone. The wish in a certain class of creative professionals today is to resuscitate the shift in the atmosphere of the nineties, that clash of the louche and the classed, the first gentrifications of downtown—impossible in the fully corporatized Manhattan of today. This cohort has too much money, too many brand sponsorships—this cohort has Instagram. Pidgeon and her John, the actor Paul Anthony Kelly, dressed respectively in the slip and in the suit, were styled to look like dolls of the real couple. The party was held at the Pool, the seafood den in midtown, where prop copies of George, the pop-culture-meets-politics magazine started by J.F.K., Jr., were fanned out on glass tables. George is currently extant in a horrific form; the trademark having been bought by a conspiracy-theorist lawyer some years ago. But that, and the degradation it represents, was allowed no oxygen in that chrome room.

Eight of the nine episodes of “Love Story” were made available for review. How Murphy and Connor Hines, the creator, handle the tragedy of the plane crash, an accident sometimes narrativized as more than the result of thick fog but the culmination of an inherited arrogance, remains to be seen. They will have to strain for good taste there. Otherwise, the tone of the show is pure cosmopolitan sympathy. So much of “Love Story” is forgettable, because the Wikipedia-page-like narrowness on the doomed romance excises all that contemporary drama—President Bill Clinton invoking J.F.K. as a forefather, Ted Kennedy, the brother of J.F.K. and R.F.K., recovering from the scandal of Chappaquiddick and the humiliation of a failed Presidential run to become the “lion” of the Senate—that makes the Kennedy story, one of a relationship to a greater culture, so compelling. One can’t subsist on the restaging of fights in the park alone! Ultimately, it is Pidgeon’s Bessette that stays with you, because she feels like an invention, an injection of an idea and a rejection of the sphinx one. Hines and Pidgeon give the woman a choreography, the dramatic toss of the hair, the hips gone concave, the Marlboro rasp in her voice. When we lose her verve, in later episodes, we feel more viscerally the first tragedy, which was how her marriage wrecked her life.

The show, a sort of elegy for Gen X, opens with a flash-forward to July 16, 1999, the final hours of Carolyn and John. On the tarmac, the lovers crouch, pressing their foreheads together, as if knowledgeable about their impending end. The early episodes are mostly devoted to filling out Bessette’s downtown existence, her professional and social world at Calvin Klein, where she is a star in the universe of the designer, who is played with spice by Alessandro Nivola. The show is a self-conscious fashion story; it gives off that defensive and wounded self-importance of some fashion people, their craft relegated on some psychological level to service work, in comparison to the arts or politics. You don’t need to understand that a siege was under way then, that Klein and Donna Karan and other provocative Americans were poised to go “uptown” to bring sex and skin to Madison Avenue, overtaking the old-money élites. Carolyn is a working girl with a budget. Before she meets John, she has a boy toy, Michael Bergin (who in real life wrote a dishy book about their “situationship,” to use the modern parlance). She is a picture of East Village resourcefulness. She lives in a world of images, of fashion, which certainly comes with its own set of politics.

Paul Anthony Kelly’s John, when we meet him, has his Bouvier bouffant stuffed under backward Kangols and baseball caps, riding his bike around Tribeca as if it were a steed. Kelly is much too recalcitrant or reverent of an actor to get at the root of Kennedy’s sexual appeal, his swagger, but at least he does look the part. The acting mandate was evidently to go puppy. There should be more grit in the story, which is too rhythmically indebted to the swoon beats of “Bridgerton.” The show invents the initial meeting to be like Cinderella crashing the ball. Carolyn sneaks into a gala; Klein, the fairy godmother, introduces her to the instantly besotted prince, John. In the annals, Kennedy and Bessette met at the Calvin Klein offices—her turf, not his—a scene that Hines recreates soon after as a domination ritual, Carolyn with pen in mouth, taking John’s measurements, as he poses in amused ecstasy. He thinks he knows his waist size—thirty-three. She corrects him. What else doesn’t he know about himself? Is there a self to know?

The political dynasty is not guaranteed a future. The fitness of the second and third generations is threatened by the very privilege they are born into. The unknowable father looms over John. The mother, meanwhile, is dying quietly in the penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue. (Naomi Watts was fun as the socialite Babe Paley in another Murphy property. Here, as Jackie O., she is a camp disaster.) Grace Gummer plays Caroline, J.F.K., Jr.,’s burdened sister, a sort of embodied critique of Kennedy playboy masculinity. Her brother is teetering on becoming a failson. When he can’t pass the bar exam, the New York Daily News relishes in wordplay—“The Hunk Flunks.”

The John of this show is like a love junkie; he needs women to fuel his pursuits, such as George. “Love Story” slavishly wants to get the interpretation “right” in painting the family not as a patriarchy but as an institution in which the women ruled, to set up the intrusion of Carolyn. In one of the few scenes to express any curiosity about Kennedy liberalism, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert, orchestrates a dinner-table game in Hyannis in which the youngest generation must give their “thoughts” on the trade embargo with Cuba. Politicking as a nasty parlor game is Carolyn’s introduction to the Kennedys.

Things have to happen for the couple to happen. The show is good at making the off-and-on vicissitudes of modern dating feel natural to the plot. The mother has to die. The pair has to dump their former lovers. Dree Hemingway (yes, that Hemingway) plays poor Daryl Hannah, whom J.F.K., Jr., was dating when he met Bessette, like she is a ghost, the representative “blonde” and “actress” for whom three generations of Kennedys demonstrated a ravenous appetite—Gloria Swanson and Marilyn Monroe coming before her. The actresses, almost like a gender, in the Kennedy story, know, to some degree, what kind of public attention to expect. The tension in Hines’s version lies in Bessette’s refusal to conform to the role. Kelly’s emotional two-dimensionality increases our anger on behalf of Pidgeon’s Carolyn, a vibrant professional woman who sees her life and her career toxified by the paparazzi and the press. She is trying to shake her man awake to the danger. There is a part of John that likes the attention. But he is alarmed to see Carolyn losing her spark, after they marry, their Tribeca loft becoming her tomb. Even so, he never truly considers leaving his cage.

So the eighth episode overdoes the whole “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” thing. It is August of 1997. Diana of Wales dies. In the compressed timeline of the show, her death has a foreboding placement, as if on the eve of the crash near the Cape. Carolyn is glued to the television, immediately identifying with the princess in the Mercedes-Benz; John can’t take her obsessing. The relationship is crumbling. He goes out for a run and returns. The two erupt in argument, in misunderstanding, with John confessing his anger at his lot. He’s no Prince Harry or William; his whole life has been colored by the threat of murder, accident, illness, assassination. The episode ends. And then the tale moves toward its ordained ending. ♦

The eighty-five-year-old photographer Arthur Tress has had a long and busy career, but the photographs that continue to define him are from the nineteen-seventies. Most of them are oddly charged, dramatically staged images meant to evoke dreams, nightmares, or fantasies. Many of the best-known photos from a series with children, published in 1972 as “The Dream Collector,” could be frames from a David Lynch film. Much of the subsequent work Tress made was similarly theatrical but tended to involve homoerotic scenes. In one picture, a slim teen-ager reaches over tentatively, tenderly, to peel a bandage off another boy’s bare thigh, a moment both touching and wonderfully matter-of-fact. Tress’s approach during this period recalls that of his friend and mentor Duane Michals, another maverick. Both photographers are storytellers, impatient with the limitations of the photograph as a document, and looking for ways to open it up to the imagination. Although their work with the male body anticipated more radical and more widely seen images from Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Bruce Weber, and others, its detour into narrative tended to place it outside of any larger conversations. I remember thinking that Tress’s photography was intriguing but melodramatic and a bit overwrought. I never spent much time with it.

Tress’s new book, “The Ramble, NYC 1969” (Stanley/Barker), and a related exhibition currently at the Clamp gallery, in Chelsea, makes me rethink all this. The work was made concurrently with another series, “Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment.” The Ramble, a wooded area on the center-west side of Central Park, was its own “urban environment.” But Tress’s prime interest was in the people he found there: mostly good-looking but otherwise unremarkable young men who were passing through, standing around, and waiting. Long before Tress arrived, the Ramble was known as a place where gay men hooked up and had sex in the bushes. In 1968, when he was in his late twenties, the photographer lived at Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street, a short walk from the Park, and, as he told the playwright Jordan Tannahill in Interview, the rocky, overgrown Ramble was “my own private cruising grounds.”

The Ramble’s ever-shifting population was more various than any gay bar’s. When Tress started taking his camera to the Park, he photographed some men “surreptitiously” but often asked first if it was O.K. For many, it wasn’t. Even if gay sex was beginning to be decriminalized at the time, a lot of the men who cruised for sex were married or closeted or otherwise on the down-low. We can’t know much about the men who did agree to be seen in Tress’s pictures, only that they comprise a small part of the population that used these paths as meeting places and hunting grounds before the sun went down. But are these photographs performances or documents? How much does Tress’s subjects’ consent compromise the “truth” of these pictures? “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery,” Tress told Tannahill. He calls it “poetic documentary.”

Even when these handsome young men are obviously posing for Tress’s camera, the work is rich and fascinating, providing a view into a world otherwise all but invisible to passersby. Tress told the writer and curator Jackson Davidow, who wrote an essay for “The Ramble,” that he’d been cruising since he was fifteen. Recalling “layers of guilt and fear” that he and others had to work through, he suggests that many of his pictures could be seen as self-portraits. So he’s especially alert to expressions of anticipation, yearning, disappointment, and the kind of loneliness that even a flash of attention can’t dispel. Some of Tress’s images are jolting, including one of a bare-chested man who appears through some thorny branches, his wide-eyed stare so intense that he looks possessed—at once sightless and a seer. Other photographs suggest sympathy or concern. In one, Tress’s subject is perched on a rock, hands clasped over his folded legs, as compact as he can be but still anxious, apprehensive. Another guy, lying on the ground in dappled sunlight, is viewed from above at a moment of unself-conscious surrender—he’s one of several subjects who looks ready to fall in love.

Such pictures provide “The Ramble” with an emotional element, but what Tress does best here is reportorial—giving us a sense of place and of ritual. Some men stop and wait to see what comes along; others keep going, always on the lookout. In many of the images, the man whom Tress has focussed on is unaware of another man nearly hidden in the foliage or on a rocky outcropping, just a few feet away—a missed connection that can seem at once poignant and comic. Tress surely recognized himself in all these men, from the saddest shrinking violet to the happy flasher with nothing under his trenchcoat but pants cut off just above the knees. But if “The Ramble” forms an extended self-portrait it also provides a mirror for its readers, queer and otherwise, navigating a world full of possibility that we don’t dare reach out and touch.

Early in my freshman year of college, a speeding car struck my twin brother, Jim, on a street near our campus. These were pre-cellphone days, but I happened to be in my dorm room when the call came in, so I got to ride with my brother in the ambulance. Our sister, Alice, who was in the year ahead of us, soon arrived at the hospital.

Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we’d never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he’d left, was pray.

We’d been raised in a devout Catholic home, attending Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, saying grace before meals, prayers before bed, and rosaries on long car rides, constantly adding sick or troubled loved ones to our intentions list. At the hospital, praying together was a distraction, but it was also an act that we believed to have some power to help our brother live through the night.

As it happens, he did live through it. His recovery was long—months stretching into years—but ultimately complete. I thanked God for that. But the memory of that first night, when I thought I was losing him forever, stayed with me. The recognition of radical human vulnerability pushes some people toward belief, but for me it had the opposite effect. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. This proved to be the initial step on a path that eventually led to my rejection of the faith in which I’d been raised. An answered prayer made me an atheist.

In many ways, those years—the turn of the twenty‑first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. In 2004, an unknown writer named Sam Harris published “The End of Faith,” a short polemic on the existential threat that religion posed to Western civilization. In rapid succession, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” (2007) followed Harris’s book onto best-seller lists, and the so-called Four Horsemen became the public face of a resurgent New Atheism. But I quickly discovered that I was not the audience for these books. I wasn’t looking to talk my way out of a belief in God—I was already out. I wanted to know what to believe in instead.

If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?

I don’t mean to suggest that the New Atheists had no moral sense. On the contrary, they were largely fuelled by moral outrage at the needless suffering religion caused. But the nature of morality was seemingly the only thing about which they did not care to argue. They thought it simply self‑evident that we desire pleasure over pain for ourselves, and that any decent person wished the same for others. One of religion’s greatest harms, they believed, was that it turned people away from this basic intuition. Of the Four Horsemen, only Harris aspired to a “science of good and evil” which could subject moral claims to the same rational scrutiny as all other claims, but his chapter on the topic quickly devolves into an argument about the indefensibility of pacifism and the moral necessity of government torture. (It was a strange time.)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

Setting down the popular polemics of the day, I began to read modern philosophy, which I understood to be the primary means by which humans have sought secular answers to life’s questions. I read the philosophers most frequently cited as models by modern‑day atheists—John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill—as well as those whom meaning‑hungry young people habitually embrace as secular gurus: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Camus. But I also read philosophers who are mostly read just by other philosophers.

Even when I was struggling with the most challenging of these works, the reading felt urgent to me. I wasn’t submitting papers or getting grades; I wasn’t looking to earn a degree or to pursue a career. I wasn’t even trying to impress people at literary parties. (For that, I had thousand‑page postmodern novels.) I was just trying to figure things out. Immanuel Kant’s three “critiques” are often cited as the works that first made philosophy inaccessible to nonspecialists, but in Kant’s opinion he was addressing very straightforward questions—What can I know?, What must I do?, and What may I hope? I was decidedly a nonspecialist, and these were the questions I wanted answered.

Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.

The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.

As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.

Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.

This so-called problem of induction was first identified not by any counter-Enlightenment reactionary but by the Scottish empiricist David Hume. Earlier empiricists like Locke and Francis Bacon believed that the physical sciences should still be grounded partly in metaphysical belief. Hume became one of modern atheism’s great intellectual heroes by rejecting this idea. But he didn’t substitute some other foundation in its place. Instead, he argued that we should simply do without foundations entirely, apart from the rather shaky ones of custom, habit, and expedience. That has been more or less the scientific-materialist answer to the problem ever since: scientific materialism just works.

If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.

Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.

Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.

Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.

A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt. (“Mankind does not strive for happiness,” Nietzsche wrote. “Only the Englishman does that.”) Many romantic-idealist writers have been fascinated by the “problem” of suicide—the problem, in their view, being that there’s no good reason not to do it.

It was this element of romantic idealism which finally led to my rejection of it. I grew tired of being unhappy and anxious all the time, of constantly questioning whether life was worth the trouble. One cause of the feeling, for me, was that the materialists had it right on an important point: there is, indeed, a world outside our heads that cannot be ignored or overpowered through force of will, and denying this is a recipe for misery.

After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.

Roughly a decade has now passed since my return to theistic belief. Barring some extreme change, this second period of faith will soon have lasted longer than my years of atheist wandering. Yet those years will always be with me, and I’m grateful for them. They have made me understand the world around me, one lately marked by sorrow and despair, in a radically different way than I would have otherwise.

The signal predicament of our era is the global rise of illiberalism and intolerance. Secular liberals who have observed these forces with quite justified horror have often linked them to a familiar enemy: religion. In their view, Christian nationalism is one of the primary ideologies behind right‑wing illiberalism. Meanwhile, they tend to see the strain of left‑wing thought which rejects universalist liberal principles as equally under the sway of a kind of faith—the “cult” or “Church” of identity politics. (Richard Dawkins, of “The God Delusion,” speaks for many of them when he declared “woke” to be a “latter‑day Torquemadism . . . with its own religiously enforced dogma.”)

“Religion” is a famously malleable sociological category, but, if we stick to the criterion of theistic belief, the argument that modern‑day illiberalism is primarily a religious movement does not really hold up. Perhaps the crudest way to make the point would be simply to note that the rise of illiberalism has gone hand in hand with a decline of theistic belief and religious practice—both in the United States and around the world. The avatar of American illiberalism, Donald Trump, is the first President in generations who does not even pretend to be influenced or motivated by Christian faith. Trump is best understood as our first Nietzschean President, a man who explicitly embraces the will to power as the ultimate value, a force to which even the truth must give way.

Many of the young and highly educated cohorts who populate the portions of the left most suspicious of universal liberal values are also among those least likely to identify as religious believers. In a different manner than Trump, they hold that so-called objective “truths” are the expression of power dynamics—tools used by the élite to oppress the marginalized. In place of these truths, they champion the importance of identity and authenticity. In other words, large groups of both the left and the right have become romantic idealists, and they have come to pose the same challenge to liberalism and scientific rationalism that romantic idealism has always posed to these traditions.

Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.

For early liberals like Locke, it seemed obvious that liberalism—like empiricism—needed to be grounded in faith, even as it sought to enshrine tolerance for different varieties of belief. For Locke, the fact that we have immortal souls subject to eternal punishment and reward means that it’s irrational to submit to a government that denies God’s will as we understand it, no matter how much coercive power that government has. At the same time, Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.

Many of the Founding Fathers held this same view. But, after Hume, liberals came increasingly to find even the barest invocation of metaphysical principles to be an embarrassment. The great post-Humean liberal theorist Jeremy Bentham called the idea of natural rights “nonsense,” and the idea of inalienable natural rights “nonsense on stilts.” Some liberals have tried to hold on to such abstract concepts without the metaphysical framework in which they make sense, but many eventually came to the Humean conclusion that liberalism could simply do without foundations, so long as it got the job done.

My own passage into and back out of unbelief—one marked by a close reading of works that earlier illiberal societies had attempted to suppress on religious grounds—has strengthened my liberal commitments. But it’s also made me acutely aware of liberalism’s very real limitations. As a means for allowing people with different conceptions of the good to live together fruitfully and peacefully, liberalism seems unmatched in human history. As a means of generating its own conceptions of goodness that feel compelling to most human beings, its record is quite mixed, perhaps because that’s not what it was ever designed to do.

What’s more, when liberals treat some version of scientific materialism as so self-evidently true that it must serve as the default context for public discourse; when they make allegiance to “reason” and “evidence,” as they define these terms, the price of admission into such discourse; and when they attempt to banish metaphysical or spiritual or even frankly religious talk from our politics and our culture, they are not practicing liberalism as its greatest exemplars understood it. They are eliminating from our shared vocabulary many of the concepts on which any justification for liberalism beyond the purely practical would have to depend.

I am not suggesting that the solution to our problems is for secular liberals to find God. But I am suggesting that religious believers be considered natural allies in the fight against irrational illiberalism, rather than its primary cause. This need not mean abandoning secularism, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning liberalism. It means, perhaps, seeing liberalism as so many liberals wish believers would see their faith: not as the expression of a universal truth to which every person must eventually submit but as a human construction—one of the finest we have ever made—worth defending even when it is helpless to defend itself, yet capable of being swept away by the same hands that built it in the first place. ♦

This is drawn from “Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.”

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The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s recent “explosion of the ego” and tendency toward megalomania, and they consider how the evolution of autocratic regimes in history can help us to predict how the rest of his Presidency may unfold. They are joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, who is the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” The group looks at how, as autocrats’ popularity decreases—as Trump’s has recently in the polls—these figures develop paranoia and entrench themselves in untenable positions, a phenomenon called “autocratic backfire.” “The key is that they end up constructing a kind of echo chamber. And so they overestimate their own abilities,” Ben-Ghiat says. “They start to believe their own propaganda.”

This week’s reading:

“ ‘If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country,’ ” by Susan B. Glasser

“Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus

“Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?,” by David D. Kirkpatrick

“What Does Xi Jinping Want?” by Isaac Chotiner

“Bad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show,” by Kelefa Sanneh

“Jeffrey Epstein’s Bonfire of the Élites,” by John Cassidy

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The grim news out of Tucson is that, thirteen days into the search for Nancy Guthrie, the odds of finding her alive have been dropping by the hour. She is the eighty-four-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie, the longtime co-anchor of the “Today” show. Not long after midnight on February 1st, she vanished from her home in an affluent neighborhood in the Catalina Foothills, on the north end of town. The investigation seemed to inch along until Tuesday, when the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the F.B.I., working jointly on the case, got a break: footage from Guthrie’s doorbell camera, which showed what the veteran journalist and former F.B.I. official John Miller described, on CNN, as “the bogeyman we’ve all feared since we were kids.” An armed intruder stood on Guthrie’s doorstep in the dead of night, wearing a balaclava, a bulky backpack, and what appeared to be black neoprene gloves.

Within twenty-four hours, more than five thousand leads poured in. By Thursday, investigators were looking for a man who’s about five feet nine or five feet ten, of average build. He was said to have been carrying a twenty-five-litre backpack made by Ozark Trail, a brand sold primarily at Walmart. There was talk of a white, unmarked van. Investigators erected a tent around Guthrie’s front door to create a blackout environment that may have allowed them to see how certain materials compared to what showed up in the video; they put out a call for neighbors’ security-camera footage from as far back as January 1st.

Demands for bitcoin had been made to TMZ and other media outlets, but their authenticity remains in question. On Thursday, TMZ’s founder, Harvey Levin, said that he’d received another note from someone who purports to know who abducted Guthrie. According to Levin, the tipster reported needing one bitcoin (worth, this week, at least sixty-five thousand dollars) to say more. The veracity of the note was again unclear, but Levin suggested that it painted “a very bleak picture.”

The F.B.I. doubled its reward for information, to up to a hundred thousand dollars, and the world went back to waiting. Time lines in such cases are vital, and this one was stretching out. The clock started on the evening of January 31st, a Saturday, when Guthrie took an Uber to the home of her daughter Annie, who lives nearby, for dinner and a game night. Annie is Savannah’s older sister; they also have a brother, Camron. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos and the F.B.I., Annie’s husband dropped Guthrie off at home just before 10 P.M., and watched her enter through her garage. Nanos later said that, at that point, “we assume that Nancy’s home and probably going to bed.”

The next morning, she failed to show up at a friend’s house to watch a recording of a church service. Inside her own home was her cellphone, along with other evidence that made it clear she had not left willingly. There was blood spatter on her front stoop, and the blood turned out to be hers. Guthrie was already physically vulnerable. She has trouble walking, and, because of a heart condition, she takes life-sustaining medicine and wears a pacemaker.

On day four of the search, the Guthrie siblings released a video on social media. They sat together on a sofa, in front of a camera, backdropped by a white brick wall. Savannah, with her sister to her right and her brother to her left, read from a sheet of paper. Her face wasn’t made up, as it is for TV, and she spoke in a congested voice that anyone who’s ever cried hard, and at length, would recognize. First, she thanked viewers for their prayers: “We feel them.” The siblings believed that their mother, a devout Christian, felt them, too.

“Our mom is a kind, faithful, loyal, fiercely loving woman of goodness and light,” Savannah said. “She is funny and spunky and clever. She has grandchildren that adore her and crowd around her and cover her with kisses. She loves fun, and adventure. She is a devoted friend. She is full of kindness and knowledge.” Addressing Guthrie’s abductor, she added, “Talk to her, and you’ll see.” Her sister spoke directly to their mother, “Mama. If you’re listening, we need you to come home.”

By the time I arrived in Tucson, on Wednesday, the crime scene had the air of a vigil. The parked vehicles of journalists stretched the length of the once quiet block. A battery of news cameras stood on tripods, all pointed at Guthrie’s front door. Camera operators and correspondents maneuvered carefully, so as not to be pricked by cacti and the long thorns of mesquite trees. Guthrie’s neighborhood is hilly, and dense with the native plants of the Sonoran Desert: acacia and olive trees, prickly pear, palo verde, giant saguaros, some of which stand twenty or more feet tall. Investigators had fanned out in the neighborhood, searching the terrain on foot. One team found and bagged, as evidence, a black glove.

TV news outlets had been treating this and every other twitch in the case as urgent information, before any connection was drawn. The glove, found about a mile and a half from Guthrie’s house, on the side of the road, may be significant, or not; it’s at a forensics lab, being analyzed for traces of DNA, hair, fibres, latent fingerprints. Criminals often separate themselves from evidence as quickly as they can, but so far it is impossible to know whether the glove was, say, tossed from a fleeing vehicle. Lance Leising, a retired F.B.I. agent whom I first met in 2012, as he worked the baffling aftermath of a high-profile ambush and murder of an armored-car guard in suburban Phoenix, told me that conjecture and social media often become “a distraction.”

Guthrie lives on nearly an acre, in a brown-brick, ranch-style house with an attached garage, a short gravel driveway, and desert landscaping. She has been there since the mid-seventies. (Her husband died in 1988.) Her neighbors live within easy walking distance but their homes are barely visible, one to the next, because of folds in the hills and the density of trees and cacti. A sheriff’s cruiser was stationed in Guthrie’s driveway, its lights flashing. At the foot of the driveway, someone had erected a large sign, covered in protective plastic, that read “Dear Guthrie Family, your neighbors stand with you.” A painted stone read “Please pray.” Visitors were leaving potted plants and grocery-store flowers, many of them yellow, symbolizing hope for a safe return. Whenever someone new arrived at the tribute point, reporters pounced on them for comment.

By then, investigators had checked Guthrie’s flat, whitewashed roof and probed her septic tank with a long pole. They had towed away her car. They had searched Annie’s home, and re-searched Nancy’s. Two drones buzzed overhead, and a chopper was up. The public had been fed aerial views of the property: a tidy back-yard parabola of green grass that led to a gated swimming pool and aqua chaise longues; blue planters; an orange tree; a patio with string lights.

John Voorhies, a Tucsonian of sixty-two years, was standing in front of Guthrie’s home, watching the activity. He’d come with a friend—a paralegal and a TikToker who had driven seven hours, from Huntington Beach, California, to see the crime scene and opine about it. Voorhies, wearing an earpiece in his right ear, was listening to this friend live-stream while strolling up and down the street. Eventually, the TikToker stopped and pointed his cellphone camera at Guthrie’s home. The sobering details of the case included the fact that her doorbell camera was disconnected at 1:47 A.M., and that at 2:12 A.M. software detected motion, though it was unclear which software, or what this meant. At 2:28 A.M., Guthrie’s pacemaker disconnected from the app that monitored it, providing an important clue to when she was taken.

Leising described five reasons someone might commit a kidnapping: financial gain, ideology, domestic discord, exploitation (for example, sex trafficking), and “delusion,” or mental illness. One could not help wondering whether Savannah Guthrie’s prominence—at a time when President Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade calling journalists “the enemy of the American people”—was a factor. Tucson is Savannah’s home town; she went to college and got her start in broadcasting here. In November, in a “Today” show feature, she included her sister and mother in a scene at El Charro, a historic restaurant, where she asked Guthrie what she likes about where she lives. Guthrie mentioned “the air, the quality of life—it’s laidback and gentle.” They toasted with prickly-pear margaritas.

On Monday, Savannah had posted another video on social media. This time she appeared alone, speaking extemporaneously as her family entered “another week of this nightmare.” Her hair and makeup were done. She was composed. The media was reporting that there was a 5 P.M. deadline for delivering six million dollars’ worth of bitcoin referenced in one of the so-called ransom notes. Savannah again mentioned faith, telling viewers that their prayers are “lifting” their mother, “even in this moment, and in this darkest place.” The Guthries believed that Nancy was “still out there.” Savannah begged the public for help: “We are at an hour of desperation.”

The images from the doorbell camera show the intruder approaching the alcoved entryway of Guthrie’s house with his head down, walking hunched over, as if trying to avoid his face being seen. In addition to the balaclava, gloves, and backpack, he’s got on a holster that is too big for what looks like a handgun inside it. He’s positioned the holster over his crotch—almost like you’d wear an athletic cup—which anyone with firearms training would recognize as amateurish. (“Tactically, it’s ridiculous,” Miller, the former F.B.I. official, said.) Reflector strips on his backpack catch a bit of ambient light, though the overhead porch light is off. He steps onto Guthrie’s doormat, reaches for the camera, and tries to cover it with his right hand. Then he turns and bends, looking for something on the ground, in the alcove, before stepping onto the front walkway and plucking stems and leaves from a withered plant in the landscaping. He walks back to the camera, with what appears to be a small flashlight between his lips, and tries to obscure the lens with that clump of dead greenery.

The video yielded what Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the F.B.I., called, on CNN, “a treasure trove” of actionable information. Leising told me, “You can go proactive on every item you saw in that video,” adding that the release of the footage likely improved the quality of the incoming leads. The analysis began instantly. The man appeared to be right-handed. His gloves were oddly thick, as if he’d doubled or tripled up. He didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. A former N.Y.P.D. detective told CNN that the suspect’s foot size could be approximated by measuring his shoes against the dimensions of Guthrie’s entryway tiles. The bricks in the entryway wall could roughly indicate height. A criminologist thought that she saw the top of a cellphone peeking out of the man’s right front jacket pocket. Observers kept talking about the man’s gait, but it was hard to draw any conclusions; Leising told me that people often move differently in the dark and when on unfamiliar ground. Facial recognition would be challenging—the balaclava left bare only the suggestion of a mustache, and a possible soul patch, and dark, arched eyebrows.

Did he arrive by automobile? If so, where was it? During the first week of the search, the New York Post reported that one of Guthrie’s neighbors had alerted police to the presence, in the neighborhood, in January, of an unmarked white van. Among the many questions being asked: Was this even a targeted kidnapping at all? Maybe it was a burglary gone wrong. If that were the case, why go to the trouble of taking the homeowner? Was there reason to believe that the man and Guthrie were still in the area? Roughly ten hours passed before Guthrie was reported missing, more than enough time to drive, say, to the border. Nogales, it was noted, is an hour and a half almost due south of Tucson, a straight shot down Interstate 19.

This is peak tourist season for Tucson, the largest city between Phoenix and Mexico, with a metropolitan population of well over a million. I arrived from the sidewalk-ice mountains of New York City to morning temperatures pushing eighty degrees. It’s turned rainy and cooler in the past couple of days, but the creosote bushes are blooming yellow. People have been wearing shorts and sundresses. Many thousands of outsiders are in town for the weather but also for the annual gem-and-mineral show; next week, there’s a big soccer tournament.

History tells us that it will be a public tip that solves the Guthrie case—the authorities have reportedly received some thirty thousand of them, so far. Overwhelm, already a danger to investigators managing a complex case, isn’t helped by online conspiracy theorists and other noisemakers. People have been using A.I. to generate a “face” for the masked man and posting the results on social media. The crime scene had already possibly been compromised by the fact that after it was prematurely released, people came through and “trampled over everything,” a retired F.B.I. agent complained publicly. “People touched things without gloves on.” Early this week, a Domino’s pizza-delivery guy showed up with food for an influencer. The sheriff’s department had to ask the public not to order takeout to a crime scene.

Armchair analysis fills the space that is created by the absence of available facts. Nanos, the sheriff, stopped giving press conferences days ago. Then, on Friday, he sat down with CNN’s Ed Lavandera, and dispelled rumors about tension between his office and the F.B.I. During the interview, Nanos said, “We have some DNA, and we don’t know whose it is,” but declined to elaborate. His office then sent an update to the media, which included: “DNA other than Nancy Guthrie’s and those in close contact to her has been collected from the property. Investigators are working to identify who it belongs to. We are not disclosing where that DNA was located.”

By late afternoon, the batch of flowers and hopeful messages outside Guthrie’s home had swelled, and neighbors had attached yellow ribbons to their mailboxes and trees. Like too many others, I’d been driving back and forth between the sheriff’s department and the crime scene, as everybody waited for the next drip of news. To get to Guthrie’s neighborhood, you can take North Campbell Avenue, a straight road that cuts through a busy business district—taquerias, Oh My Chicken, Ross Dress for Less, Kung Fu Noodle, Cartel Coffee Lab—and begins to curve just after you cross the Rillito River. To the north, Mt. Lemmon looms, monumental, and the terrain gets a bit steeper. A few turns and there is Guthrie’s place. There are no gates, or street lights.

A signature feature of Tucson is its nighttime skies, which the city protects with an ordinance designed to suppress light pollution. Voorhies, the local whom I met on my first day in town, told me, “You can’t see your hand in front of your face.” Come back at night, he said, and listen to the coyotes howl. ♦

In the absorbing new thriller “Crime 101,” a man tells a woman that, if she wants to get in touch with him, all she has to do is post a beach pic to her Instagram account. Circumstances require that they keep their interactions a secret, and this will be their way of communicating in code. The film itself, which is set in Los Angeles, is replete with coastal imagery, though what these visuals signal isn’t especially cryptic: for all three of its protagonists, the beach is either a dreamed-of destination or a cherished refuge. A slippery jewel thief, Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), hides out in a luxury apartment overlooking the Pacific. Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a Los Angeles Police Department veteran, aspires to have an ocean view himself one day, which comes as no surprise to Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry), an insurance broker he’s meeting with. “Why else,” she asks, “would anybody want to live in this town?”

As a happy longtime resident of Pasadena, a city in a landlocked stretch of Los Angeles County, I blanched at this wrongheaded sentiment and tried my best not to hold it against Sharon or the movie. I also stifled a laugh during a scene in which Lou, arguing with his soon-to-be ex-wife (a little-used Jennifer Jason Leigh), claims that he’s moving to the ocean: “I’m way more beach than you are!” he insists. Ryan Gosling’s Ken, from “Barbie,” couldn’t have said it better. Happily, though, “Crime 101,” which was written and directed by the English filmmaker Bart Layton, sidesteps more L.A. clichés than it barrels into, even allowing for its mild groaner of a title—a reference to Route 101. (The film shares that title with its source material, a Don Winslow novella set farther south, in San Diego.) Lou is trying to solve a string of robberies committed by a culprit who targets jewelry stores located along the 101, presumably to facilitate a speedy getaway. No one who’s inched their way through traffic between Hollywood and downtown will buy this logic, but no matter.

The robber, of course, is Davis, who is something of a pacifist prince of thieves. He abhors violence and endeavors to commit his crimes as humanely as possible, keeping the extractions clean by prepping heavily in advance. A tense opening heist sets the tone and establishes Davis’s M.O.: he intercepts a stash of valuable diamonds as they’re being transported from one location to the next, armed with a gun, a disguise, and, crucially, in-depth knowledge of the transporters’ home addresses, family members, and other personal details. Davis himself has no permanent address or family to speak of, and comes across as void of personal information. On a dinner date with a young woman named Maya (Monica Barbaro), he’s magnetically inscrutable; when she asks what he does for a living, he mumbles something about “software development” and moves on. Hemsworth, in a beautifully controlled performance, plays Davis as a charismatic savant—a tad clenched and awkward in his rare social interactions, yet still capable of friendliness, decency, and charm.

Those qualities bind him, in a spiritual sense, to Lou, who can’t suppress a quiet admiration for the criminal he’s pursuing, and also to Sharon, the insurance broker, who is unwittingly drawn into both men’s orbits. She’s investigating a claim filed by Sammy Kassem (Payman Maadi), a jewelry-store proprietor who was robbed by Davis, and soon she’s sparring verbally with Lou over the specifics of the crime. Later, Sharon and Lou will have a friendlier run-in at a yoga studio—a cautiously deployed SoCal cliché and a rare coincidence in a plot where connections and entanglements are otherwise quite plausibly mapped out. One way to read “Crime 101” is as a savvy, moderately sardonic corrective to Paul Haggis’s “Crash” (2005), in which various Angelenos are forever crossing and recrossing paths in ludicrously contrived fashion, and every fender bender is a cry of rebellion against the loneliness of life behind the wheel. “We crash into each other just to feel something,” someone says in “Crash,” and “Crime 101” comes close to redeeming even that heavy-handed sentiment. An accidental rear-end collision is what brings Davis and Maya together in the first place—and their ensuing relationship, though not without its bumps, sends the story on some of its more pleasurable curves.

Watching Davis and Maya gradually open up to each other—their first date begins at a chichi restaurant, which they quickly abandon for street tacos—you might be reminded of the characters played by James Caan and Tuesday Weld in “Thief,” Michael Mann’s Chicago-set thriller from 1981. Layton draws even more visual and narrative inspiration from “Heat” (1995) and “Collateral” (2004), the two exhilarating crime dramas that cemented Mann’s reputation as the reigning poet of nocturnal Los Angeles. More than once, “Crime 101,” shot by the director of photography Erik Alexander Wilson, grooves on the transfixing image of a freeway at night, backed up in both directions: two slow-moving rivers of light, one white and one red. It’s an obvious homage, but it works. The vistas are hypnotic to the point of drugginess.

There are other aesthetic Mann-erisms on display: in the gunmetal gleam of Wilson’s images; in the score, composed by Blanck Mass, which supplies an endless, infectious line of jittery propulsion; and in the car chases, which are unfailingly realistic and, as a consequence, astoundingly forceful. (When a car flips over mid-pursuit, your response will likely be not a whoop but a sharp intake of breath.) Yet the film’s greatest debts are less stylistic than philosophical: “Crime 101” is, like many a Mann movie, about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of work. Davis, Lou, and Sharon all turn out to be detectives of a sort, each with a gift for quick-study discernment; they take an unmistakable pride in doing their jobs well and react defiantly when their employers fall short. Sharon, who’s spent years waiting to be made a partner at her firm, is repeatedly sidelined by corporate ageism and sexism. Lou is stymied by the matter-of-fact corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, to the point of not even being able to trust his partner (Corey Hawkins). And Davis’s integrity puts him at odds with his longtime fence, Money (Nick Nolte, nice and growly as ever), who responds by enlisting the services of Ormon (Barry Keoghan), a platinum-blond thug on a motorcycle. Keoghan, with his flinty stare and wiry physique, is reliably cast as agents of chaos, and as Ormon he unleashes a level of violence that nearly tears a hole in the picture. You want him to die the moment he appears. Ormon’s rage isn’t just scary; it’s messy, unhinged, an affront to the smooth professionalism and sneaky compassion that Davis, Lou, and Sharon evince. For Keoghan, the role represents both a homecoming and a reversal: he starred in Layton’s previous feature, the docudrama “American Animals” (2018), in which he played an amateur crook of a rather more cautious, morally conflicted temperament.

“American Animals” was a painstaking deconstruction of a real-life heist, from 2004, which made room onscreen for the culprits as well as the actors playing them. Before that, Layton directed “The Imposter” (2012), a documentary portrait of a prodigiously gifted con artist. “Crime 101” may be his first entirely fictional feature, but it’s recognizably of a piece with his earlier work, in its fascination with the psychology of thieves, its attention to forensic details, and the exacting deliberation with which it unfolds. At two hours and twenty minutes, the film is as susceptible to sprawl as the city in which it unfolds, though I do wish that its wide-ranging love for Los Angeles—downtown, Echo Park, Hollywood, Historic Filipinotown, and Santa Monica are all on the long list of shooting locations—had translated to an equivalent curiosity about the city’s various siloed demographics. (Poverty, which turns out to be Davis’s greatest fear and motivator, is viewed chiefly as a white man’s affliction.) Maadi, the superb Iranian American actor who came to international prominence in Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” (2011), establishes his character as a compelling presence in a few bristling early scenes—and then vanishes from the picture far too soon.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill. You believe Hemsworth, Ruffalo, and Berry, even if you never quite lose sight of the world-weary archetypes they represent: the emotionally anesthetized crook, the rumpled detective, the industry veteran at the end of her tether. It was refreshing to emerge from “Crime 101” and only then remember that Ruffalo and Hemsworth, still best known to most of the moviegoing world as Hulk and Thor, have shared several bloated C.G.I. extravaganzas’ worth of screen time. In this way, Layton’s imperfect but enveloping L.A. noir offers an escape from what Hollywood typically considers escapism. The actors, no less than the characters they play, can take pride in a job well done. ♦