Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. USA, 206 minutes, IIB. Opens Oct 19. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Journalist David Grann’s 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, is a compact 350 pages. It tells a sprawling story about history, greed, power, and the legacy of colonialism that still resonates. And while there are sure to be grumblings about Italian-American filmmaker Martin Scorsese directing this very Native American tale, there are few filmmakers better equipped to wrangle a nonlinear story about institutionalized corruption, crime and the devastating impact of the two than Scorsese is. He has made a career out of stories about people, mostly men, destroying themselves over the idea of wealth as the most American of goals, and here he transplants his urban crime drama model onto post-World War I Oklahoma. It’s an almost perfect match.

In truth, initially, the script by Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth (Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Steven Spielberg’s Munich) was conceived as a thriller about the seeds of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation as we know it today, and hence was more reflective of Grann’s title. But they quickly realized that the story really ought to be about Lily Gladstone’s Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart — her marriage, the loss of her family, and the rampant, systemic murder of Osage people by white men who were after the former’s money. Legendary FBI director J Edgar Hoover saw the Osage Indian murders of the 1920s as the ideal vehicle to demonstrate the value of a new, science-forward, nationwide police force in the United States. But bowing to the sentiments prevailing at the time, he did not send his first agents to Oklahoma.

Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. USA, 206 minutes, IIB. Opens Oct 19. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Such prejudice toward the Osage murders is a thread that runs through Killers of the Flower Moon — a masterful achievement in storytelling by any standard.

In the early 1920s, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is untethered. He’s just back from fighting in the war and has limited prospects. He gravitates to Fairfax, Oklahoma, and his uncle, rancher and all-around businessman William Hale (Robert De Niro). The self-professed “King of the Osage Hills” has his fingers in every pie. He’s friendly with the local police and the gangsters, and especially the Osage — the richest people in the country thanks to the oil rights they own. He speaks the language and ingratiates himself into their lives. Hale puts Ernest to work as a driver, and in turn Ernest meets and romances Mollie, who’s mourning the loss of her sister. Her sister is just the latest in a wave of untimely deaths afflicting the “sickly” Osage. Others have been found shot. The deaths get the attention of the FBI, and eventually, years into the epidemic, Tom White (Jesse Plemons), an FBI agent, is sent to investigate.

To suggest that there’s more to Flower Moon than a cross-cultural romance and a murder conspiracy is an understatement. Over the course of three impeccably paced hours, Scorsese uses his two favorite muses (De Niro and DiCaprio) to interrogate how ingrained white supremacy has informed America’s thorny (at best) relationship with its Native people and rationalized stripping them of their agency, while also painting a vivid and almost-visceral portrait of what such agency might have looked like. Gladstone (Reservation Dogs) helps on that front, making Mollie weary, afraid, and angry; embodying the tragedy but never coming across as pitiable.

All this is wrapped in a gripping Western-thriller in which Scorsese’s regular crew — cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and composer Robbie Robertson — transport us back in time to a moment that looks remarkably like today.