Netflix’s ‘The Outsider’ Shines a Spotlight on the Jared Leto Problem

In The Outsider, the brand new Netflix movie releasing today, Jared Leto plays a white American imprisoned in Japan for a decade and then released after he saves the life of a yakuza, quickly becoming a great yakuza enforcer himself. From the description alone, you know it’s going to be a problem: another white tourist living out his Westworld fantasy of playing yakuza. And not only playing yakuza, but being the best little yakuza there ever was. Someone who watched Kill Bill and was like, “Can I do that too, even thought I don’t carry all the added complications of being a woman in a criminal world?”

The Outsider is obnoxious merely in its conception; fifteen years after The Last Samurai saw Tom Cruise show up all of Japanese history, we’re once again elevating a white, American golden boy into post-World War II Japan to ransack the culture. But then casting Jared Leto into the bargain really just doubles down on every bad feeling you already had. Sometimes you have to wonder why Leto has come to occupy a place of such cultural irritation in many corners. His porcelain, eternally boyish looks that give him the appearance of one of those creepy Victorian-era dolls that come to life in horror movies probably contribute. But there’s also his career choices, which all have the air of a dabbler. It’s the cornrows he sported in Panic Room. It’s the 30 Seconds to Mars rock-star posture. It’s his Oscar-winning role as a transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club. Hell, it’s the pretty boy he played in Fight Club who was too enamored with the underground testosterone terrorist gang he was joining to realize he’d never make it out intact. It’s in the stories from the  Suicide Squad set where he attempted to get into character as the Joker by mailing his co-stars dead rats, in an effortful bid to mimic any number of method-acting urban legends.

Leto wasn’t the first choice to play the role of Nick Lowell in The Outsider. Michael Fassbender was once sought out, and Tom Hardy was attached back when Takashi Miike was set to direct. Those all sound like vastly different movies that may or may not have been able to crawl out from under the fog of the white-savior trope, but Leto is not your guy for that. What’s doubly frustrating is that by casting Leto, director Martin Zandvliet (who directed the very good 2015 Oscar-nominated Danish film Land of Mine) and screenwriter Andrew Baldwin could have really dug into the themes of cultural tourism and appropriation and the macho Orientalism that comes with revering the yakuza in the first place. The above-mentioned Westworld comparison could have offered a real template. Instead, Baldwin’s script finds every avenue possible in order to give Nick a kind of white-man’s justification for everything he does.

In an early scene, after Nick has saved the life of a yakuza in prison and has been rewarded with his freedom, he encounters a corrupt and loudly racist American bureaucrat (Rory Cochrane) still in Japan after the War (have I mentioned that we’re supposed to be only a handful of years post-Hiroshima in this movie, even though the aesthetics all scream contemporary?). After letting Cochrane bloviate for several minutes, using up as many racial slurs as he can manage for the Japanese, Leto’s character bludgeons him with a typewriter. See? He’s the good, non-racist American. Later, Nick’s uber-problematic relationship with the sister of his yakuza mentor is given a primer of righteousness when we see her get sexually assaulted by a yakuza who has just previously sneered drunkenly at Nick. I’m sure I’ve seen more ham-fisted script contrivances in order to force the audience onto the protagonist’s side, but not many.

In a better movie, one with some dazzling action or a twisty plot or anything more narratively daring than Leto cutting off his pinkie finger in order to display his loyalty and then literally standing back to bask in the audience’s astonishment. This is a movie that’s way too concerned with justifying its main character than in giving that main character anything interesting to do or be. This white savior movie can’t save itself.

Stream The Outsider on Netflix