‘Catch Me If You Can’ on Netflix: Bask In Leonardo DiCaprio At His Most Effortlessly Charming

There was a time when it seemed like Leonardo DiCaprio could play anyone. Over the course of his nearly 30-year career, from early starring roles like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and The Basketball Diaries, to heartthrob megastardom in Romeo + Juliet and Titanic, and meaty leading roles in Gangs of New York and The Departed, Leo’s ineffable charm and exuberant energy have allowed him to shine wherever he lands. 

Now 45, he faces the prospect of moving into a different phase of his career — just as does his character Rick Dalton, the aging Hollywood Western actor at the center of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, a role for which DiCaprio received his sixth Academy Award nomination earlier this week. This Leo’s older and craggier than we remember him (even if his off-screen love interests seem to stay the same age), a grown man capable of playing weary, middle-aged doubt and depression staring down the rejection of an industry that forever favors youth. He’s wonderful in the role, showing a side that he’s rarely had the opportunity to demonstrate before.

As we crest the hill into this new era of Leo-mania, though, it’s as good a time as any to look back at once of his most youthfully-charming roles, that of wonder-boy con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. in the 2002 hit Catch Me If You Can, which has conveniently just been added back to Netflix. Starring across from Tom Hanks — a luminary actor who successfully made his own transition from boyish charmer to elder statesman of the screen — DiCaprio tells the dramatized true story of Abagnale, a runaway teenager whose skill at impersonation and forgery made him one of the FBI’s hardest criminals to catch.

The story begins in 1963, as young Frank’s family is falling apart. When the IRS seizes the family home and his parents split, Frank Jr. runs away from home, learning to make his way through his incredible (and illegal) ingenuity. He impersonates a Pan Am pilot, a medical doctor, and a Southern prosecutor, forging checks and identifying documents and skating by on his million-dollar smile. Hot on his heels is Hanks’ Carl Hanratty, the dogged FBI agent obsessed with bringing him in. Hanks operates at his usual high level here, portraying Hanratty with a rumpled, dog-eared weariness and a hilarious vein of incredulous anger at the fact that he keeps getting fooled by his pursuit.

The overall historical accuracy of the film is, like many Steven Spielberg productions, creatively massaged for the benefit of the story. Frank Abagnale was in fact a real person, and he did pull off many of the same audacious feats of impersonation shown on screen here, eventually becoming one of the FBI’s top weapons against those sort of crimes after his capture. What really drives a story like this — like any good con job — is someone who can pull it off with a straight face, and it’s hard to imagine anyone more suited for that role than Leonardo DiCaprio at this point in his career.

Though it’s a breezy, fun and often-comic film — one that was even adapted into a short-lived Broadway musical — there’s a great deal of pathos underneath the surface as we follow Abagnale’s globe-trotting, shape-shifting spree of misadventures. He’s deeply cool and convincingly calm sliding into the role of a doctor, lawyer or pilot, but when left alone, he’s revealed as the lonely teenager he is, running simply because he has no home to return to after his parents’ split and his mother’s re-marriage. It’s a deft balance to play, this is where we truly see Leo’s range. Midway between the boyish roles in Gilbert Grape or Titanic and the mature gravitas that would allow him to play an undercover cop in The Departed, the then-27-year-old DiCaprio’s able to muster flashes of bravado amidst the wounded vulnerability of youth.

In the end, it’s a good old-fashioned chase picture, as Abagnale cleverly slips his way in and out of character to escape the monomaniacal Hanratty hot on his heels. Given the immense likability of both actors, a viewer can be forgiven if they find themselves rooting both for Abagnale’s capture and his escape. (You wouldn’t want to see Tom Hanks sad, would you, you monster?)

Perhaps Leonardo DiCaprio won’t give up playing youthful charmers quite yet. (Hollywood has been known to be forgiving to actors as they age, as long as they’re men.) Or maybe he’ll follow the path laid out by Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood’s Rick Dalton and eventually come to terms with the next phase of his career. In time, he could be a venerated old salt like Hanks, even, playing the Captains Phillips and Misters Rogers of the next generation. For my money, though, he may never be as good as he was in Catch Me If You Can, a young man playing a teenager playing a full cast of characters.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Watch Catch Me If You Can on Netflix