The Mastermind

In 1970, in the town of Framingham, a down-on-his-luck carpenter named JB Mooney hatches a risky plan to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the local art museum. Motivated by financial strain and a stubborn taste for something bigger than ordinary life, he borrows money from his parents and then borrows more from his wife’s family under the pretense of funding work. With that seed money, he enlists two partners, Guy Hickey and Ronnie Gibson, to pull off the heist. The trio makes it to the museum, where the theft unfolds with tense precision: Gibson unloads a gun on a student not far from a homework assignment and a security guard is overpowered, while the others act in concert to take the paintings.

Back home, the audacious act is immediately front-page enough to provoke a chilling reaction from J.B.’s family. He proudly displays one stolen canvas in his living room, only to pull it down again after his father, a respected judge, openly questions the thieves’ ambition and the whole enterprise seems to spiral into a larger moral drama. A makeshift plan forms as J.B. constructs a shipping container for the paintings and stashes them in the loft of a barn, yet the household atmosphere grows heavy with suspicion as local police and the FBI question every member of the Mooney clan. The investigation tightens when Gibson names J.B. as the mastermind during a bank-robbing arrest, a claim J.B. vehemently denies while struggling to protect his family.

Facing exposure, J.B. asks his furious wife to take their boys, Carl Mooney and Tommy Mooney, to his parents’ house. Yet the close bond of the family is tested when Tommy balks at leaving, complicating the expulsion from their fragile domestic circle. A crucial turning point comes when Guy Hickey calls to press for more money, and a later meeting with J.B. and Tommy turns out to be a trap: an organized crime outfit abducts J.B. and forces him to reveal the paintings’ precise location. The revelation thrusts J.B. into a precarious limbo, where he must choose between loyalty to old friends and the escalating danger surrounding the stolen art.

As the net tightens, J.B. escapes into hiding with two old friends from art school, Maude and Fred. While Fred seems exhilarated by the escapade, Maude intuits a deeper calculation: J.B.’s scheme might have been designed to use a familiar professor—an admirer of Dove—as a fence to move the paintings. Maude’s confrontation with J.B. is candid and practical; she urges him to leave, while he hesitates, torn between old loyalties and a safer path. He rejects a suggestion from Fred to lay low at his brother’s Toronto commune, choosing instead to press on toward Cleveland to stay with other friends. The plan falters when he learns those friends have already left town, forcing him to hitchhike his way toward Cincinnati.

The paintings themselves have a terse arc of their own, eventually turning up back at the museum, which leaves J.B. to reckon with the consequences of his actions. He reaches out to Terri, trying to rationalize everything and request money, but her dismissal is swift—she hangs up. With finances strained and the road ahead unclear, J.B. faces a final, stark choice: he cannot afford the bus fare to Toronto, and in a last-ditch scramble, he pockets an elderly woman’s purse and blends into a crowd of antiwar protesters. The rally erupts in chaos, the police crack down, and J.B. finds himself jailed in the back of a police van along with other protesters, a stark end to a plan built on ambition, frailty, and the unraveling of a family.

Last Updated: December 04, 2025 at 15:32