The whole film is just the dying dream/fantasy of the 1990s Frank Minna of the book
Pretty straightforward - the whole plot of the book stemmed from the fact that Frank Minna was a huge fan of old mob movies and noir, to the point of even founding a mostly-anachronistic two-bit detective agency for him and his men to hang around in while scraping a living as small-time criminals. The mystery Lionel gets to the bottom of in the book is ultimately a small, bleak, personal drama involving a handful of people wrapped up in a localized financial scam, and nobody comes out of it with much more glory or redemption than they went in with. The idea of a whole alternate story - an epic, no less - set in the actual 1950s, where Frank and his men were all legitimate Private Investigators and Lionel unravels an enormous conspiracy reaching all the way to the Mayor's office, the newspapers and the richest, most powerful people in New York, culminating in a triumphant and redemptive ending - feels exactly like the kind of yarn the barely-fulfilled literary Frank Minna of the '90s would have relished envisioning.- Also, the story only diverges from the book after Frank fatally shot in the first act; the events leading up to that are virtually a beat-for-beat adaptation.
- The fact that the film makes only passing verbal references to the Minna Men's childhood at the orphanage before being taken under Frank's wing further bolsters this, as a very large percentage of the book told all those events from the young Lionel's perspective, while to Frank that was an uninteresting and anecdotal time.
- The film features a song written and performed by Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers - first heard in the soundtrack earnest, then reworked as a wordless jazz song performed at Laura's uncle's club, and later worked back into the score in instrumental variations. Could Frank be imagining a more noirish spin on a song he'd heard by two of the most prevalent music artists of the 1990s?
