When I talk to people over the age of, say, 45, they often ask what happened to Hollywood. It used to make movies filled with stars playing compelling characters. Now, all it offers are pseudo-characters like Deadpool who spend the whole movie making in-jokes about their branded cinematic universe. Where are the stories about human beings?

The short answer is that you can still find a few of them on streaming services. Take the new action comedy The Instigators, now streaming on AppleTV+ after a week in a handful of theaters. Directed by Doug Liman, it stars Casey Affleck (who co-wrote the script) and Matt Damon as likably maladroit Boston crooks who get caught in a robbery gone bad. Despite its forgettable title, The Instigators is an amusing throwback to classic heist pictures, buddy comedies and tales of urban malfeasance.

Damon plays Rory, a depressive screw-up desperate to earn money to pay child support and win back his son’s respect. As a one-time deal, he agrees to help rob the corrupt mayor of Boston — played by a hammy Ron Perlman — at a big election night party where he’ll be given cash bribes. Rory will get a cut of $30,000 which frankly sounds like a figure from the 1970s. So will his fellow crew member Cobby, a wisecracking ex-con played by Affleck.

Through no fault of theirs, the heist goes south in almost every way — the haul is a pittance, a cop gets killed, Cobby catches a bullet. Suddenly thrown together as sidekicks, Cobby and Rory run around Boston pursued by vengeful police, by the crime boss who set up the caper — that’s an also-hammy Michael Stuhlbarg — and by the mayor’s personal enforcer, a slab of a man played by Ving Rhames in full monolith mode. And meanwhile, Cobby keeps bleeding.

Now, it’s an odd feature of movies about Boston that I’ve never seen one that made me want to go there. Indeed, Boston boosters like Damon and Affleck seem to take a weird pride in showing off their city’s corruption, clannish neighborhoods and knuckleheaded blue-collar bravado. That’s certainly true of The Instigators.

It’s not merely that Cobby keeps making insider Boston jokes (in this he is like Deadpool) that won’t play anywhere else. The film’s whole sensibility is tinged by the great Boston writer George V. Higgins whose crime novels, like The Friends of Eddie Coyle, did much to shape the city’s self-image. It romanticizes its refusal to be romantic.

You get that in the performances by Damon and Affleck, two excellent but different actors, here playing guys who aren’t that bright. Where Affleck always seems somewhat off-kilter, even when playing ordinary guys, Damon exudes a normalcy that people now call “relatable.”

As the low-key, sensible Rory, Damon’s the movie’s deadpan wall against which Cobby endlessly hits the tennis ball of his jokey chatter. Affleck and Damon are longtime friends, and you can tell. It’s fun to watch them bicker and stew and drive each other a bit crazy.

Yet even as I was enjoying myself, I kept wishing The Instigators had the lucid snap of the movies it harks back to. While the plot is the kind of confection Hollywood used to be expert at making, the storytelling often feels sludgy, like an indie film. Secondary characters are too lazily drawn to be fun; good jokes too often get lost in the shuffle.

Deep in the movie, Cobby reveals a painful secret that should change Rory’s sense of his new partner. An old-time Hollywood director would’ve known how to move us with both Cobby’s revelation and Rory’s reaction to it. Liman barely lets the emotion register. It’s not that he’s talentless. Most famous for The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith — he recently did the remake of Road House — he’s just out of practice at telling stories about actual human beings.

But he’s trying. And so are Affleck and Damon, who clearly are the film’s driving force. Back in the 1970s, The Instigators would probably have been the second or third best movie coming out on any given week. In 2024, it’s Hollywood’s best movie this month, at least for viewers who don’t marvel at Marvel.

The outside tables at Figaro Bistrot are far too close to one another. A group of women is seated beside us, drinking white wine and leaning together to murmur while giving me side-eye. My date gets up, excuses himself and heads to the bathroom. One of them leans over: “So is that your dad?”

I’m pretty sure I turn bright red and simply reply: “No.”

When he gets back, he places his hand on the thigh poking through the slit of my dress. The women’s eyes widen, and they look at one another and giggle. I’m not sure if I’m really into him. There’s a part of me that twists with disgust at the whole situation. But I ignore this — and ignore the giggles.

The conversation up until then revolves around a film he once wrote. “I spent about 10 years trying to get it picked up. But hey, it worked out in the end,” he says. His film won a number of awards and was widely critically acclaimed. “Everything I’ve written since then I haven’t really cared about.”

It shows. He hasn’t written a single film since his first that wasn’t panned. But I still feel a sense of pride that he wants me, this lowly grad student; maybe this is what it really means to date in L.A.

Until then, most of the men I’d dated in L.A. (who were around my age) were starving artists, aspiring filmmakers and musicians who worked in the meantime as grips and waiters.

Their dreams were always endearing, and having money doesn’t particularly matter to me. I was just never a part of their dreams. The previous men I dated always told me that I deserved better, that they weren’t looking for anything serious (always after a few months of dating, and it always turned out that I wasn’t the only one they were dating). I wasn’t sure whether I was looking for something serious either, but what I really wanted was someone who would see me as girlfriend — or perhaps even wife — material. There’s nothing more important than being lovable, even if the basis for this is being young and decently attractive.

My date is about two years younger than my father (who didn’t have me at a particularly young age). However, he has an Instagram and an iPhone and is a writer, which makes me feel like he isn’t too dissimilar to me after all. He finally asks me about myself: “What is your research about?” As a master of none, I never really know how to answer this question, so I recite a list of areas I’ve dabbled in. One of them is the bildungsroman.

“What’s that?” he asks. My image of him crumbles a little.

It dawns on me that the real reason I’d taken the upper limit off my Hinge settings and agreed to this date is that I thought I might find someone like my former professor, whose class on the bildungsroman was my main motivation for applying to grad school. I had a major crush on him; he had the exact same taste in music as me (think classic college-radio male manipulator), made stupid jokes and had a smile that made me melt. He was from Los Angeles, and I can’t deny that some of the motivation for me applying to USC was a subconscious desire to trace his steps.

But this man, my date, clearly wasn’t him.

Then he asks me if I want kids. “No,” I firmly reply. But then I find myself backtracking: “At least, not now.” I’m surprised that I say this. Am I scared that he won’t want me anymore if I don’t want kids, even if I’m realizing that I don’t want him?

“Women always say that. Why is it that every woman I’ve met has said that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not really in the position to support a child right now.”

“But I am.”

He grins, and the twist of disgust grows. There’s something sinister about his smile that makes me realize that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all. But I find myself ignoring this.

“I guess we’ll have to see.”

The evening turns into night, and we end up inside the restaurant, sharing the same side of a booth. At one point, he asks to take a selfie. I oblige.

Should I be on a date with this man? I’m not attracted to him and I don’t find him interesting. But he seems like a man who actually wants me even if he doesn’t really know who I am. The other reason I agreed to this date is my deathly fear of aging and losing my attractiveness to men. I remember the first time I looked in the mirror at age 21 and realized that I was deteriorating.

Since then, I’ve religiously followed a retinol and sunscreen regime, but I still found the bags under my eyes growing and growing. I asked Reddit what I should do about this, and I was recommended under-eye filler. I debate the pros and cons of this every day. It pains me to know that one day it’ll be too late. As a decently attractive but still somewhat average woman (r/Rateme classified me as a 6 or 7, and in L.A., that means a 4 or 5), youth is mostly what I have going for me. And I know all too well that L.A. men aren’t interested in my pursuit of a PhD in comparative literature, which might even be intimidating.

The next day I apologize to him over Instagram. I never got his number. I tell him that I had a great time, but I don’t think we have enough in common.

“I think we have more in common than you think. I’m always here if you change your mind.”

A few hours later, he sends me the selfie he took.

Beside him, I look like his teenage daughter, and in a sick way, that makes me happy.

The author, a comparative literature PhD student at USC, lives in Studio City. She’s on Instagram: @sarahgarrodwrites

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