Capote visits Perry on death row to gather what everyone will expect to find in the book — the events of that night. In other words, he descends into the netherworld for a scoop. At the same time, we believe that Capote is deeply moved and changed, perhaps destroyed, by the way Perry breaks through to the celebrity writer who swishes into the penitentiary to get a story.

Perry thinks of himself as an intellectual, a person who uses "big" words. (Capote's interest in him is first piqued when Dick Hickock, the other killer, tells him that Perry corrected Dick's grammar on the way to the Clutter's house.) More importantly, Perry has a supra-intellectual cunning; he knows when he's being lied to or exploited and he fiercely resents it. Craig's Perry is so deeply bitter and so innately muscular that his hostility has car-totaling impact. It takes a lot of force, though not much effort, for the feral Perry to pierce the deceptions (and self-deceptions) of Capote the high-flying, cosmopolitan journalist. In Capote, the effect the author had on people was always calculated because the makers wouldn't have been interested in a protagonist who wasn't, in the end, a hero: the writer of a fully achieved work. In Infamous, Capote clearly does not anticipate setting off the combustible Perry, and the result rattles some unexpected sense into the story.

We don't have to believe what we see literally. Perhaps Capote didn't have such unrestricted access to Perry, left alone with him in his cell with no guard. But even if this is fancy, it allows for scenes that dramatize what Perry and Truman come to feel about each other. This part of the movie works as expressionism without veering into the grotesque. Rather, what was grotesque in life comes closer to us until we can look at it without defensive reflexes. Perry may be raging but he's not senseless, repellent.

Arguably, the movie's high point is the moment when Perry demonstrates to a terrified Truman how the sensational title In Cold Blood makes him feel. (Perry's means are expressionistic, too.) The scenes between him and Truman seethe with a sexuality that is tinged with both brutal, instinctual violence and unprotected emotion. (We also get a sense of how the crime festered up from the tension between Perry and Dick.) Craig's Perry becomes the destructive-creative daemon of the movie, inspiring Capote by shattering him.

Overall, the movie makes a transition from light to dark. It flutters to life in Manhattan with Capote the social butterfly and then reveals something more parasitic about him in Kansas. But by pairing the opportunistic writer with the murderer who is straining to be understood, McGrath makes it so that the movie's bright and dark sides can't entirely be distinguished. When, in an early meeting, Perry gets up in Truman's face in defense of Marlon Brando, who hated Capote's caustic 1957 New Yorker profile of him, crazy-funny takes on a new aspect.