The Luckiest Man in America Review: No Whammies, All Wins

Television game shows have long served as microcosms of the American Dream. They’re neatly packaged worlds where ordinary citizens can transform their fortunes through knowledge, luck, and gumption. But what happens when someone cracks the code? Director Samir Oliveros‘s The Luckiest Man in America tackles this fascinating true story with a mixture of 1980s nostalgia, dark humor, and surprising psychological depth.

There’s something irresistible about a good game show. The flashing lights, the canned applause, the manufactured suspense of whether the contestant will walk away with a car or a can of soup—it’s spectacle as comfort food. But The Luckiest Man in America reminds us that, sometimes, someone figures out how to rig the recipe.

The year is 1984. Press Your Luck is daytime TV’s crown jewel, and Michael Larson is a down-on-his-luck ice cream truck driver from Ohio with too much time and a VCR remote on his hands. In Oliveros’s slick dramatization of Larson’s true story, we watch Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) turn this oddball trivia footnote into a full-blown folk anti-hero. He does it one spin at a time.

Hauser plays Larson with the sort of twitchy intensity that’s become his calling card, but there’s something different here. This isn’t his schlubby, wounded Richard Jewell performance or his out-there scene-stealing turn in Cruella. As Larson, he’s controlled chaos. A man constantly underestimated, hiding a laser-focused mind behind a bushy beard and thrift-store blazer. He doesn’t want fame, he wants validation. Or maybe it’s vindication. Either way, he’s going to get it, even if he has to fake his way into a Press Your Luck audition to do so.

And that audition scene? It’s a gem. Shamier Anderson (John Wick: Chapter 4), as Chuck, the casting director, pegs him for trouble right away. But David Strathairn’s (Nomadland) Bill Carruthers, one of the show’s creators, smells an everyman narrative the audience will eat up. They both turn out to be right. Larson charms, stumbles, and then refuses to lose in the now-legendary second round of gameplay. What the audience thinks is luck is actually memorization. Larson has cracked the board’s pattern, and he exploits it with almost supernatural confidence. The tension of watching the lights spin—knowing that Larson knows where they’ll land—is pure cinematic catnip.

Walton Goggins (Three Christs) is pitch-perfect as Peter Tomarken, the show’s host, all smarmy charm and shiny suits. He gives just the right edge of confusion beneath toothy smiles as the studio realizes something’s wrong. It’s a tricky needle to thread—playing a man slowly unraveling in front of a live audience. But Goggins nails it with a masterful tightrope walk between performance and panic. Maisie Williams (The Owners) adds energy as a skeptical production assistant who sees facade cracks. Anderson has a terrific subplot that peels back layers of racial and industry politics in Reagan-era TV.

Growing up glued to 1980s game shows, I developed a strange attachment to these daytime rituals. Their gaudy sets and forced enthusiasm became oddly comforting. The Luckiest Man in America captures this cultural moment with remarkable precision. From studio lighting to the particular cadence of game show patter, every detail rings true. The production design by Lulú Salgado deserves special praise for recreating the Press Your Luck set. The meticulous attention to detail makes watching the film feel like stepping through a time portal.

What the film does so well in its compact 90-minute runtime is recreate ’80s game show glitz without condescension. Carolina Serna‘s costume design is retro without being overly precious, and Pablo Lozano‘s cinematography bathes the entire thing in a warm, fuzzy haze of nostalgia. You can almost smell the Aqua Net and polyester.

Because that’s the rub. Was Larson cheating? Or was he just smarter than the system? That’s the question the movie doesn’t try to answer so much as play with, letting you toggle between admiration and suspicion. It taps into old-school American dream mythos. If the game is rigged, maybe the only winning move is beating it at its own game. When the lights fade and credits roll, The Luckiest Man in America doesn’t hit you with moral judgment. It hits you with ambivalence—the good kind. The kind that leaves you talking on the way out of the theater, maybe even wondering what you’d do if you could hack the system for one perfect moment under the lights.

For those who grew up watching Press Your Luck (and groaning at every Whammy), this is a sly, sharply made throwback. It has brains behind the nostalgia. Not every move it makes is flawless, but it absolutely sticks the landing. And like Larson himself, it wins big just by playing a little smarter than anyone else thought possible.