What was it about the late Robert Redford that made him such an appealing outlaw, specifically a thief? He was convincing in other roles, of course, like an idealistic politician or a tenacious journalist or various CIA guys. But throughout his career, he would return to thievery in many of his best films: planning train robberies in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; repeatedly stealing an elusive diamond in The Hot Rock; breaking and entering for security testing (and later, to save the global grid) in Sneakers. So it’s appropriate that Redford made an unofficial swan song out of playing an affable bank robber and frequent prison escapee in David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun.

Technically, Redford didn’t disappear from screens after the film’s release. He did a little cameo in Avengers: Endgame reviving his (dead) character Alexander Pierce, the baddie from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, though apparently his Avengers role was shot before the Lowery film. Earlier this year, he did another cameo in the third-season premiere of Dark Winds, which he produced. But as a movie star, The Old Man & the Gun was it in 2018, capping off a surprisingly busy 2010s – it was his ninth movie of the decade, making it his most productive period since the 1970s. His 2010s-era movies mostly couldn’t match the ’70s run, but Old Man & the Gun very much does.

Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a real criminal profiled in The New Yorker, who has spent much of his life committing nonviolent bank robberies, getting thrown in prison, and escaping. The movie picks up in 1981, two years after his most recent escape, in the midst of his latest bank robbery. As a means of strategically avoiding the police, Forrest stops to help Jewel (Sissy Spacek), a stranger having car trouble, along the side of the road. They get to know each other, though he keeps his career a secret for a time. But as a dogged cop (Casey Affleck) hunts him down, Forrest must decide whether to make a go of a life on the straight and narrow.

Regardless of what Forrest was like in real life, he has a highly specific Redford charm in The Old Man & the Gun, further reshaped to the craggier contours of the star who retains his good looks at eightysomething with necessarily less of the golden-boy glow that emanated from him in the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond. Redford was never a fussy actor, not one to attempt to disguise himself or disappear into a role. That doesn’t mean he always played the same guy; just that he had the confidence to play a variety of roles with the tools at hand. (Makes sense, when said tools include being really, really good-looking.) That’s the movie’s Forrest Tucker all over. In an early conversation with Jewel, he quietly lays out his background as a bank robber, and walks her through the steps of how he robs a bank. Like his retelling, it involves calm, low drama, and a flirtatious charm. If there’s another way, whether it would involve hurting people or better helping himself, he doesn’t seem interested. As he explains his strategies, the genuine pleasure he must take in the robbery is visible on Redford’s face. The psychology behind this bizarre career may be concealed for the moment, but he can’t hide his natural enthusiasm.

Forrest hedges a little at the end of this season, telling Jewel what she clearly wants to hear: That he’s joking, and isn’t really a bank robber. In later scenes, he’s making a similar hedge to himself – not denying his skill or enjoyment of the act, but hedging about whether it’s something he truly needs to do. Redford’s character work is so strong and true that later in the movie, when Lowery presents a numbered montage of Forrest’s prison break-outs, it feels like Redford is participating, even though many of the younger versions of the character are shown in shadow or from behind – with one shot from the 1966 film The Chase that really is a young Redford, completing the illusion.

It’s lovely filmmaking, the likes of which Redford’s other 2010s movies hadn’t really matched, and doubles as a tribute to the vision of this WASP-y actor as a no-sweat outlaw. Maybe that’s part of what made Redford such an appealing criminal: He looks like he could do lots of things, fit into lots of moneyed worlds. For some starts, that just means they aren’t especially convincing in certain outlier areas. For Redford, though, it makes him weirdly convincing as the criminal element: If this handsome bastard really spends his time on thievery and other illegal activity, it must be a part of who he is. It must be his cracked version of honest work. With further retrospect, as Old Man stands as Redford’s last starring role, it’s easy to code charming criminality as acting more broadly, a connection made more explicit by The Sting – the con-artist comedy for which Redford received his only (!) Oscar nomination for acting. There may be something deceptive, illicit, and/or self-indulgent about it, but the craft itself is undeniable.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.