Oil-rich members of the Osage Nation become targets for con men in 1920s Oklahoma in Killers of the Flower Moon, a Martin Scorsese-directed and -cowritten movie based on the non-fiction book by David Grann.

Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns stateside from serving in the Army in World War I to live with his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) at his cattle ranch in Oklahoma. Call me uncle or King, Hale says to Ernest, which gives you a sense of how Hale thought about himself and his importance. Calling himself the “King of the Osage Hills,” Hale has learned the Osage language and has positioned himself as the friend to his Osage neighbors, who have grown rich due to the discovery of oil on their land. More than 2,000 people, and their legal descendants (who can be Osage or white), have headrights to the oil money. Their wealth has attracted all manner of scammers, from the guys overcharging for family photos to the government that hands out money in a conservatorship for fully grown adults under the guise of helping them manage their money. Hale would be one of those scammers, with his “I speak your language” shtick being a very thin veneer over his greed and racism. Also among the scammers are the white men who marry into Osage families to get a piece of the oil rights — particularly if their wives should meet bad ends.

When Ernest meets unmarried Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) while working as a driver, Hale encourages him to court and marry her to get their family connected to her family’s headrights to the oil money. When Ernest marries Mollie, she gains a husband but over time loses her sisters and mother, Lizzie Q. (Tantoo Cardinal), to either suspicious illnesses or violence. Mollie also struggles with her health — she has diabetes. Hale is able to help her receive the relatively new medicine that is insulin but strangely (a-hem) it seems to be making her sicker.

Meanwhile, we see Ernest and Hale work to get other people out of their way, from Osage people Hale figures out how to make money from to others who could implicate him in his crimes. It takes a long time and a lot of deaths before the pleas of Mollie and others in the tribe to the federal government to send someone to investigate the murders of Osage people are answered in the form of FBI agents led by Tom White (Jesse Plemmons).

Killers of the Flower Moon has what I think of as the Gangs of New York problem. Here, like with that Scorsese film, the central Leonardo DiCaprio story is significantly less interesting than all the stuff around it. The story of the Osage Nation — its history, the tensions between generations, how the money changed the culture, the relationship with the federal government, the Osage relationship to the white people drawn to the area by the money — is infinitely more compelling than the story of this one shifty dirtbag and his huckster dirtbag uncle, particularly when you’re comparing the can’t-look-away magnetism of Lily Gladstone to DiCaprio or even De Niro. She absolutely commands your attention and gives Mollie a depth and complexity, and everything gets a little dimmer when she’s not on the screen.

Comparatively, Ernest and his uncle just seem like grifters — and not particularly clever ones. The star wattage of DiCaprio (and some gross but fascinating teeth) and De Niro (who looks like he’s cosplaying Harry Truman) don’t make the characters feel any more substantial. They feel like petty criminals who stumbled into a big score. The way their criminality is supported by a whole crooked, racist system of who has legal rights, justice and opportunity in 1920s Oklahoma is probably the most interesting element about them.

You get the sense from the movie that Scorsese knows that the central crime and its criminals aren’t as compelling as these other factors — especially the Osage people. According to all the stories I’ve read about this movie, he started off wanting to make a movie from the FBI point of view (or, really, BOI — Bureau of Investigation, as it was then called) and then shifted perspective to focus more on the Osage and Mollie’s story. That’s a good decision and how earnestly he’s made it becomes particularly clear with the movie’s final scenes — the final shot literally puts Osage people at the center and fills the screen with their story. But there are elements that we either get to see only briefly or don’t really see at all. We never really get an explanation of what the marrying white men arrangement does for Mollie and her sisters, why they agree to marry these men even though they sort of always suspect that the men are after them for their money. The movie gets us close to Mollie but it never quite lets us see through her eyes, to understand from her perspective.

All that said, this movie works more than it doesn’t. Gladstone is, as expected, great. Maybe we never quite break through on understanding Mollie but Gladstone does a lot with what she’s given — her still face just considering a person or situation can say more than a soliloquy. And while she doesn’t have a lot of scenes with Cardinal’s Lizzie, I feel like you get a lot about their mother-daughter dynamics from what we do get.

DiCaprio makes a good villain — sometimes a little too good; the movie doesn’t quite sell me on why Mollie stays with Ernest — and has not a trace of that DiCaprio glamour. De Niro isn’t the star here but he gives some heft and personality to a weaselly character.

There is also a lot of technical craft and beauty to this film, which creates a visually interesting world and then moves through it, like, Scorsesily. I felt his eye on this in a way that wasn’t as self-referential as, say, The Irishman but was like a showcase for his skill — with putting people in vistas, with moving through space. This movie is three hours and 26 minutes long but it doesn’t drag or feel excessively flabby to me. There is an energy to this movie that helps keep your attention throughout.

Killers of the Flower Moon is solid drama movie fare, made exceptional by Gladstone’s performance. B+

Rated R for violence, some grisly images and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Martin Scorsese with a screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (based on the nonfiction book of the same name by David Gann), Killers of the Flower Moon is three hours and 26 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Apple Films.

Featured photo: Killers of the Flower Moon.