Starring Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, and Winona Ryder. Rated 14A.

What is the cinematic appeal of hit men, mass murderers, and serial killers? Perhaps it’s their ability to combine extraordinary awfulness with everyday behaviour. The real-life subject of The Iceman, Richard Kuklinski, was rather unusual in that he managed to turn his favourite hobby into a lucrative living while devoting himself to a “normal” New Jersey family that never saw what was coming.

If Kuklinski really looked like Michael Shannon, who specializes in tightly wound psychos from any era of history, he’d likely make most people nervous. But Israeli-born writer-director Ariel Vromen actually downplays the antihero’s inner and outer ugliness and his beyond-psychotic past. Although alluding to the guy’s animal-torturing (and very abused) childhood, he has him drift somewhat innocently into contract-killer territory.

When roughed up by New Jersey wise guy Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta), Kuklinski displays the cuke-cool demeanour of the film’s title. (The actual DeMeo was another compulsive killer.) Chilly Richard soon overearns his nickname, especially after hooking up with a hit man called Mr. Freezy, due to his ice-cream-truck cover. Oh, and his habit of icing murder victims and dumping their bodies months later, to stymie police and coroners.

As Freezy, an unrecognizable Chris Evans joins David Schwimmer, Stephen Dorff, and other baroquely mustachioed actors who, like the 1970s cars and fashions, provide a light-handed retro sheen. In contrast, Winona Ryder looks amazingly fresh-faced as Kuklinski’s willfully ignorant mate and mother of their two adored daughters.

Ryder’s poignant performance as a clueless version of a Sopranos gang wife gives this rather detached tale a needed gravitas. But a small vein of seriousness doesn’t exactly justify Vromen’s slo-mo, requiem-like climax, complete with half-baked passion-play music; after all, the subject’s 1986 arrest is already addressed at the beginning. The quasi-religious denouement is weird, but this is America.