Motherless Brooklyn is a 2019 American neo-noir crime film written, produced, and directed by Edward Norton, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Jonathan Lethem.

Set in 1957 New York City, the film stars Norton as a private investigator with Tourette syndrome, who is determined to solve the murder of his mentor.

Motherless Brooklyn also stars Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Ethan Suplee and Willem Dafoe.

Motherless Brooklyn premiered at the 46th Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2019, and was theatrically released in the United States on November 1, 2019, by Warner Bros. Pictures.

In 1950s New York City, Lionel Essrog works at a detective agency alongside Gilbert Coney, Danny Fantl, and Tony Vermonte.

Nicknamed "Motherless Brooklyn" by Frank, Lionel has Tourette syndrome and OCD, often alienating him from people, but his strong verbal and photographic memory make him a good detective.

Lionel listens over the phone as Frank presents documents that threaten a business deal for a man named William Lieberman, who's there with his assistant Lou and an extremely large henchman.

He realizes that Frank's findings involve Laura Rose, who works for Gabby Horowitz fighting urban renewal; poor and minority neighborhoods are being bought out and demolished, forcing out their residents.

Inside Frank's hat, Lionel finds the key to a Pennsylvania Station storage locker, containing a property deed and Laura's birth certificate, which reveals Moses is her father.

Norton took significant creative license with Lethem's book,[4] keeping only the character of Lionel Essrog, his mentor Frank Minna, and the idea of him investigating his surrogate father's murder;[5] deviations The Atlantic's David Sims considers "both radical and baffling".

[6] Although the novel takes place in a modern 1999 setting, Norton rewrote the story for the 1950s, because the "characters are written in a very 1950s hardboiled detective style ... and if we try to make a film about the '90s in Brooklyn with guys acting like '50s gumshoes, it will feel ironic.

[5] For other characters, Norton drew inspiration from Hortense Gabel and Jane Jacobs who were prominent critics of housing discrimination in New York during the 50s and 60s,[10] and he replaced the book's love interest Kimmerly with Laura, the unknowing daughter of Moses Randolph.

[5] Lethem spends considerable time in the book depicting Lionel's childhood at the St. Vincent's Home for Boys orphanage, something the movie only briefly references.

[5] Edward Norton is the grandson of James Rouse, an urban planner who argued that housing should be affordable to all and that communities should be shaped by humanistic impulses rather than purely economic ones.

[19] Production commenced in February 2018 in New York City, with Norton, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Alec Baldwin, among others, set to star.

Norton has credited The Wire with giving him a long-standing desire to work with Williams and also called it "a great dissection of the complexity of American urban life".

[36] Norton enlisted jazz musician Wynton Marsalis to rearrange the song as a ballad reminiscent of 1950s Miles Davis,[36] with pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, bassist Russell Hall, saxophonist Jerry Weldon and drummer Joe Farnsworth.

[4] In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside Terminator: Dark Fate, Harriet, and Arctic Dogs, and was projected to gross $5–9 million in its opening weekend.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Motherless Brooklyn's imposing length requires patience, but strong performances and a unique perspective make this a mystery worth investigating.

"[59] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film four out of five stars, writing, "it's Norton's own performance that brings emotional connection to Motherless Brooklyn.

"[60] Peter Debruge of Variety commented that "Lionel represents both an enormous new challenge and an incredibly unique variation on the otherwise worn-out private eye archetype.

"[63] Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "stylishly made, politically driven, musically arresting, narratively confusing and, at nearly two-and-a-half hours, far too long.