Penn is excellent as real-life con artist John Vogel, opposite his daughter Dylan who also does well as Vogel’s journalist daughter Jennifer
Sean Penn … he’s still got it. He may have exasperated audiences with The Last Face, his previous directorial outing at Cannes, an earnest Western-aid-saviour drama that pretty much got him booed off the red carpet. But as an actor he’s still got the chops: a fierce masculine presence, a buzzard-like watchfulness always liable to break into a scornful grimace or lethal grin. His seductive address to the camera is almost unrivalled. Moreover, as a director, he knows how to bring the horsepower. And so it proves in this very watchable and well-made family drama.
Penn directs and stars as notorious criminal, swindler and counterfeiter John Vogel, wanted in the 90s by the FBI for forging thousands of $100 bills from a Minnesota copy shop. His story was told in the memoir Flim Flam Man: A True Family History, by his daughter, the author and journalist Jennifer Vogel. He was a compulsively exuberant and charming man that she adored, but he broke her heart by running out on the family, by spinning endless lies, and finally by being unable to accept the redemptive love that she desperately offered him, a slippery sociopath to the last.
