Elegance Bratton gives actors room and is drawn to people trying to find somewhere they belong. We value that attention, but By Any Means exposes a weakness: he can be too indulgent towards forceful performers who need firmer direction.
Fi1m perspective
In By Any Means (2026), the FBI needs the mob's help to solve a murder. Elegance Bratton has found a partnership that ought to make a crime drama uncomfortable, but he is too content to let forceful men get things done. There are effective bursts of tension, though not enough to make us recommend the film. We grew frustrated because the film kept giving someone another chance to take charge instead of staying with a doubt or a consequence.
The earlier work helps explain that disappointment. Pier Kids (2019) documents homeless LGBTQ young people in New York, while The Inspection (2022), his debut narrative feature, draws on his Marine boot camp experience. Documentary and autobiographical drama give him people whose need for acceptance he understands from experience. His recurring subjects are belonging and self-worth, and a compromised crime partnership could have extended those concerns. We wanted to know what these men were prepared to overlook in order to keep working together.
His trust in actors does bring rewards. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives By Any Means a performance worth watching, and Mark Wahlberg brings a blunt comic energy to the mismatched pairing. Bratton is right to allow humour into a historical crime drama; the comedy is not the problem. Wahlberg's excesses are, especially when they dominate characters already thinly written. The familiar partner-thriller rhythm then makes it too easy to anticipate the kind of scene that comes next.
The craft around them is more persuasive than the writing. Terence Blanchard's music treats the men's decisions seriously, and Tommy Love's production design makes the setting feel inhabited. Neither can make those decisions less predictable, but both show that this need not have been such a routine film. We are interested in what Bratton does beyond autobiography, provided he is prepared to restrain his actors when they need it. Start with The Inspection for a more direct introduction to the experiences that inform his work.
Biography
Elegance Bratton is an American director, writer and producer. He began his career in the 2010s with the short film Walk for Me (2016), the reality series My House (2018) and the documentary Pier Kids (2019).
His feature directorial debut The Inspection (2022), which he also wrote, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released by A24. Bratton has also directed episodes of American Horror Stories (2021) and Grotesquerie (2024). His second feature, By Any Means (2026), is a Paramount crime thriller.
Bratton studied at Columbia University and New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He received the Film Independent Truer Than Fiction Spirit Award in 2021 and was named a United States Artists Fellow in 2022. He is married to producer Chester Algernal Gordon.
