Robert De Niro in Barry Levinson Mob Drama

There are some good reasons for actors to play multiple roles in a film. If they’re playing twins, for example. Or clones. Or if the film is so outlandish that it feels appropriate, like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.

But having Robert De Niro play real-life gangsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese at once simply feels like a casting stunt. The end result is that Barry Levinson’s otherwise sober-minded The Alto Knights too often feels like The Patty Duke Show if Patty and Cathy had become mafiosos.

If this film feels familiar, that’s because it is. From its pedigree to its casting to its themes, Levinson’s new effort comes across like a retread. Even its original title, Wise Guys, well, you know. That doesn’t make The Alto Knights (a terrible title, by the way, taken from the name of the social club where the gangsters made their headquarters) bad — it just makes it feel redundant. But it’s good to know that so many former cast members of The Sopranos are still getting work.

The screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi (yes, of Goodfellas and Casino fame) tells a potentially fascinating story, but in an uninteresting way. Dealing with the fractious relationship between gangsters and former friends Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, the film strains for an epic quality that the filmmaking doesn’t support. And the decision to have the proceedings narrated by Costello, with De Niro talking straight to the camera, makes it all often resemble a rambling monologue delivered by your grandfather when you visit him in Florida.

The film presents Costello as a refined, thoughtful gentleman who masked his criminality with charitable causes and a respectable veneer, and Genovese as a vengeful, thuggish type who resorts to brutally violent means to achieve his ends. The story begins with a failed hit on Costello by future mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis, Shogun), here depicted as a clod who wanted to replace Costello as boss of the Luciano crime family. Miraculously surviving after Gigante shoots him at close range, Costello spends the rest of the film figuring out how to walk away from his criminal life and stay alive in the process.

Using enough archival footage and old photographs (many altered to include the actors) to fill a Ken Burns documentary, The Alto Knights sluggishly depicts Costello’s loving relationship with his perpetually worried Jewish wife Bobbie (a thickly accented Debra Messing, in an atypical dramatic role) and Genovese’s volatile relationship with his drag club-owning wife Anna (Kathrine Narducci, The Irishman).

Other significant plot elements include Costello’s testimony before the Kefauver hearings, during which he refused his lawyer’s advice to take the Fifth, with disastrous results; the barber shop murder of Costello’s loyal ally, Albert Anastasia (Michael Rispoli); and the infamous Mafia summit meeting in upstate New York that ended abruptly when local police became suspicious of all the fancy cars with out-of-state license plates suddenly invading the area. Regarding the last incident, the film not-so-subtly suggests that it was all a set-up by Costello to ensnare his rival, one of many theories that have been debated over the years.

Novelistic in its detail and talky to the extreme, the film feels longer than it is. Cramming in incident after incident but without the galvanizing energy that De Niro’s usual mob film collaborator Martin Scorsese would have brought to it, The Alto Knights resembles a television miniseries that’s been chopped up for theatrical consumption. Toward the end of the film, there’s a lengthy verbal digression about the origins of Mormonism that makes you want to throw up your hands. Levinson also employs various stylistic devices, including intercutting a murder with scenes from the 1949 gangster classic White Heat, that feel strained.

But the most problematic element is its supposed biggest selling point: the presence of De Niro, an acting icon of the genre, in both main roles. De Niro delineates the two characters, who appear in several scenes together like the twins in The Parent Trap, with different vocal cadences (Genovese’s voice is much higher), hairlines, and considerable make-up and prosthetics. He’s more than capable of handling the daunting assignment — he’s De Niro, after all — but the net effect is ultimately so gimmicky that it saps the movie of its intended seriousness. It’s a fatal miscalculation that consigns The Alto Knights, Levinson’s first theatrical film since 2015’s Rock the Kasbah, to being a footnote in the distinguished careers of both its director and star.