Our male protagonists – or perhaps men more broadly – are searching for meaning, solace, or glory anywhere but in the workplace. The trend represents a collective ambiguity about the point of work.
What’s a better way for a man to spend his time: building a successful business or pursuing a delusional scheme of self-destruction? In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, supposed carpenter James Blaine “JB” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is confident of the answer to this one. At his parents’ house for family dinner, JB’s father Bill Mooney tries to agitate him with news of a peer’s thriving business.
Bill: He’s the boss of his own outfit. Tells the whole team what to do.
JB: He spends all his time balancing books, scheduling, on the phone.
Bill: Those are the tasks of the top man.
JB: It’s an idiotic way to spend your time.
It’s not long before JB kicks off a shambolic museum heist that unravels his life.
His is an outsider’s creed — and one shared, paradoxically, by the leading men of nearly every major critically acclaimed film this year. These are no wolves of Wall Street: male protagonists are on screen this year searching for meaning, solace, or glory anywhere but in the workplace.
In one group, we have quitters like JB. Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) declines shoe shop management for table tennis in Marty Supreme; Marcelo Alves (Wagner Moura) would rather become an enemy of the state than work for a new corporate stooge in The Secret Agent. Wouldn’t these guys stick around for a job where they actually get to do what they love? Not if Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), the wheelman of F1, is any indication. While he may love to drive, he turns down a steady job at the pinnacle of car racing in favor of gig work and his independence.
Another set is working hard at hardly working. Is This Thing On?’s Alex Novak (Will Arnett) focuses on stand-up comedy, not his finance job. Bugonia’s Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) clocks in at the warehouse only to sustain his basement conspiracy laboratory. Weapons’ Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) ostensibly owns a construction business, but is mainly using its assets to hunt those responsible for disappearing his son. Even William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) in Hamnet is, after all, initially a man leveraging his father’s glove business as a way to break into the theater world. Finally, there’s One Battle After Another’s Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an off-grid former revolutionary who doesn’t appear to have ever held a real job at all.
Given the labyrinth of film production, it’s to some degree coincidental that all these films arrived in this cycle — but a striking one compared to previous years. Both of the past two years were led by men devoted to and defined by their work: Maestro, Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, and Napoleon in 2024, and The Brutalist, The Apprentice, and Conclave in 2025. By contrast, this year is not about men navigating institutions, organizations, boardrooms, or the halls of power. It’s about beating an alternative path outside these structures.
What circumstances have forged these unorthodox, unmoored men? Other films might dwell on the hard and unfair working conditions these men are escaping, but these guys seem pretty fine with their jobs. Marty seems to excel at selling shoes in his uncle’s store. Will Shakespeare suffers his father’s tyranny at the home workshop, but still takes the trade with him to London before pivoting to life in the theater. Even Bugonia’s representation of an Amazon-like megacorporation warehouse isn’t so bleak in a movie of bleakness — instead of acting as the source of his madness, the warehouse seems useful to Teddy for pursuing his other ends. What led JB or Bob to reject the expectations of polite society and become (quite different) outlaws? These films don’t say.
If it isn’t the nature of bad jobs pushing them out of the workplace, perhaps these stories are about the promise of less traditional ways to apply oneself, alternative and self-made forms of work? Perhaps not, considering the characters leading the best actor race. Marty is not a table tennis obsessive. He does not lust after a perfectly placed winner or the hustle back and forth to retrieve his foe’s shots. The film isn’t about the shoe shop, but it’s also not really about athletic competition. It’s about the selfish scramble to find adoration and acclaim that happens in the absence of real fulfillment.
We don’t get to see how that all turns out for Marty long term, but Bob Ferguson’s early retirement into a hermetic haze is also far from an endorsement of his single-minded focus on the revolution. Bob is portrayed as a sham hero, having been primarily motivated to join the revolutionary struggle out of a passion for risk and romance and still facing the consequences of his impulsive gambit to this day. For both of them, the undertakings they pursue outside of ordinary employment are all very stressful — and it’s not clear what they ultimately gain from it all.
As far as futility goes, however, they are both richly rewarded compared to Marcelo, the next most likely role to be recognized with the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Wagner Moura’s man on the run gives up his university position rather than bow to a corporate crony of the Brazilian military dictatorship, actually does find new meaning among the dissident community, and attempts to balance the work of subverting the state with care for his son. Spoiler alert: he ends up murdered anyway, later barely a memory to his grown child.
Then again, the men on screen this year who do try to find meaning through work don’t fare much better. In No Other Choice, a desperate laid-off corporate man will do anything to claw his way back into the paper industry, including disposing of a few bodies. In Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke’s Lorenz Hart is consumed by the words he can no longer get paid to write. And the men of Sentimental Value, Train Dreams, and Eddington are all deeply committed to their jobs — just ask their broken families how that turned out. And the film this year with a record-breaking sixteen Academy Award nominations? Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is about the horrific consequences of two brothers leaving war and crime behind in order to start a small business.
The score: leaving the workplace doesn’t make you happy, but neither does fighting to get back in or grinding to climb the ladder. If this all seems quite confusing, it is. Just ask the men of the real world.
What Is Work For?
For all our agreement on a loneliness crisis in men’s social lives, it’s far from clear what exactly is going on with men’s work lives.
There isn’t a measurable job satisfaction crisis. With the exception of non-college-educated men age sixteen to twenty-four, there isn’t a significant change in men’s workforce participation either. Workplaces have become far less dangerous for all workers, while the gender disparity has remained steady. Despite common tropes about younger generations flitting about the workforce, job tenure among young workers has stayed fairly constant for the past forty years (as for all workers). The manufactured narratives of the Right — that efforts at gender equality are pushing men out of the workforce, or that welfare assistance is making men weak and lazy — may be useful to their political project, but they’re also not true.
And yet, as reflected in these films, there is no doubt a broader anxiety about whether the traditional workplace can provide men with the satisfaction, status, or glory they desire. Beyond the nature of any particular job, one compelling possibility is that we are missing a dominant cultural ideal for the economy and a good society within which we could understand this work. In his 2019 book Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, Nicholas Lemann describes three kinds of men — and thus three kinds of creed — that have attempted to orient economic life. “Institution Man” believed in the centrality of government and corporations; “Transaction Man” in the wisdom of financial markets; and “Network Man” in the power of online networks.
These ideas, Lemann writes, “share a kind of conceptual grandeur, a conviction that if we aim at producing a good society by adopting one all-encompassing principle, the result will be positive for everybody. It’s only necessary that the game be constructed so as to guarantee that somebody’s notion of the good guys . . . will always win.” Lemann makes a compelling case that these modes are true or good, they have been deeply influential, and, in different ways, continue to be. Nonetheless, we find ourselves in an interregnum: “Network Man” attempted to replace the older frameworks, but failed. Already in 2019, Lemann writes that that the dream of Silicon Valley
has quickly lost its broad appeal; the country has pivoted from awestruck admiration of the big new Internet network companies to resentment and suspicion, as it has become clear that the social and economic benefits of the new system belong mostly to the companies themselves and not the users of their products.
We are done with the Institution Man of The Apartment (1960), the Transaction Man of Wall Street (1987), and the Network Man of The Social Network (2010). Unfortunately, the “union man” of socialist aspirations won’t soon be a model here, given the downward trend of union density. Today it’s hard to identify the dominant idea of what the sum of all our work is actually for beyond each individual’s paycheck. Without a shared idea of what work is for, entropy sets in. Half of all men age eighteen now have active online sports betting accounts; over a quarter of young men age eighteen to twenty-nine own crypto. One survey of Gen Z found that they ranked “creator” as the “most accessible or feasible career.” Never mind the order of institutions or networks — these are signals toward individualization and risk-taking.
While these trends are not necessarily viable seeds of a new model, they do reflect a search for something beyond what today’s workplace offers. Despite their different backgrounds and approaches, the men on screen this year send the same message. Is there any doubt Marty would launch a meme coin? Would JB not find his way to becoming a vintage reseller on Poshmark? Can we not imagine Bob Ferguson at the podcast microphone?
If there is a man on screen this year that may represent a different model, some harmonious blend of work and purpose, it is One Battle After Another’s Sensei Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro). Sergio is a man of tranquility in a world of chaos: not only deeply embedded in community, but deeply grounded in himself, lending the world of the film a sense of magic, connection, and direction. He is a paragon of solidarity, of dignified work in and beyond the workplace. But for now, he is just what his name suggests, not just a man but a saint, an incarnation of another world.