Leonardo DiCaprio is recognized as one of the 10 Best Actors of the Year

Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the Great Performers of 2019. Chosen by The New York Times Magazine critics Wesley Morris and A.O. Scott, the annual Great Performers Issue names the 10 actors whose work was the most captivating, challenging, shocking and inspiring in the year gone by.

Do you consider Leonardo DiCaprio funny? Like, on purpose? Well, please do! Some of his best moments are the riotous ones. Once, in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as the wolf, he downed some quaaludes and rolled down the steps of a country club like a sack of apples in a stop-motion dream. Another time, he was one of those genteel antebellum racists — Calvin Candie in “Django Unchained” — whom he inflated with a lot of “I do de-clahr!” effrontery. (With all due respect to Django, DiCaprio was unchained.) Rick Dalton is the latest and most embarrassed enrollee in DiCaprio’s Comedy Club.

Rick is an actor whose star, in 1969, has grown dingy. And in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” DiCaprio has a ball recreating Rick’s TV-western mulch and B-movie schlock. He gives the gunslinging every ounce of deadpan machismo he can summon and becomes exactly the flamethrowing maniac you need for an action pageant called “Fourteen Fists of McCluskey.” DiCaprio has to hold on to the movie’s satirical showbiz insanity as well as Rick’s alcoholism, square bravado, insecurity, faded stardom and private misery.

None of that is funny, per se, except that DiCaprio wills it to be so, not simply in the furious mock-Hollywood bits but in a long, gorgeous passage right in the middle of the movie, on the set of a western series. Rick has taken a gig as a villain (another one), and before the cameras roll, he finds himself chatting with a young co-star who tells him he’s the best actor she’s ever worked with. In between, Rick flubs a line and, in costume and in his trailer, proceeds to berate himself for being an undisciplined hack. It’s as divine as any of DiCaprio’s great eruptions, at once a joke on acting and perhaps a window into the soul of a star — Jack Lord devastated that he’ll never be Jack Lemmon. I’m with the kid. Sort of. Rick is one of the most mediocre actors I’ve ever seen. But it takes a real maestro to summon all that talentlessness and keep knocking you out of your chair. — Wesley Morris