McCaul Lombardi has spent the better part of a decade quietly assembling a filmography that festival programmers love, and casual moviegoers keep stumbling onto by accident. Baltimore-bred, festival-blessed, and stubbornly drawn to indies that have something to say.
Ranking his roles is fun precisely because there is no obvious blockbuster to point at, no big franchise. What you get instead is a tight resume that runs from a Midwestern road trip to a Marine boot camp. Below are the McCaul Lombardi performances worth pulling up tonight, ranked and dissected.
From Baltimore Football Fields to the Croisette
Lombardi was born in Baltimore in May 1991. He is the son of a healthcare professional and a high school football coach, and his original ambition was to be a football champ. A playing injury redirected him, Los Angeles called, and acting became the new sport.
His feature debut was no soft landing. He walked straight into Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and the door has not really stopped opening since. Four of his first films premiered at Cannes in four years, two of them in the Official Selection.
How These Rankings Were Built
- Performance and complexity. How much is happening behind the eyes, how layered is the work, and does the character read as a real person or as a screenplay device wearing a costume?
- Critical reception. What did reviewers actually say? Festival recognition, NYT Critic’s Picks, and trade write-ups all count, even when they disagree with each other, which they often do.
- Cultural footprint and audience impact. Did the role travel beyond its festival circuit, or did it stay in the indie cocoon? Both outcomes can be artistically right, but they read differently on a ranking like this.
The Ranked List: McCaul Lombardi’s Finest Performances
1. Sollers Point (2017): Keith, the role that decided his lane
If you only watch one McCaul Lombardi film, make it Sollers Point. Matt Porterfield’s Baltimore-set drama hands Lombardi his first true leading role, and he repays the favor by delivering a performance with the moral grime baked in. He plays Keith, a twenty-four-year-old who has just gotten out of prison and is living with his dad under house arrest. The ankle monitor is the plot. The real movie is what Keith does with his head and his hands while the rest of the world expects him to fail.
What makes the work land is that Lombardi refuses to telegraph the redemption arc, because there is not one, and he refuses to telegraph the relapse arc, because that would be too easy. Keith is just present, drifting between people who love him and people who would rob him for fun, and Lombardi plays both relationships with the same low-key wariness. The film was named a New York Times Critics’ Pick and premiered in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival, which is the indie circuit’s way of saying pay attention to this kid.
It is the role that announced he could carry a movie, and it remains the best argument for why he should be doing it more often.
2. American Honey (2016): Corey, and the breakout that put him on the map
Number two is a sentimental call, a chronological call, and frankly, a defensible call. American Honey is the movie that introduced Lombardi to the world, and it did so in a film that runs almost three hours, won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and shares a roof under A24, which is to say the entire indie cinema universe was watching. Andrea Arnold’s sprawling, sun-bleached road movie follows a magazine sales crew of misfits criss-crossing the Midwest, and Lombardi is one of the misfits in question, playing Corey.
The cast is famously deep, with Sasha Lane carrying the lead and Shia LaBeouf doing his most committed work in years, and yet Lombardi never gets steamrolled. He picks his spots, plays the energy of a boy who is having the time of his life and also possibly losing it, and uses the looseness of Arnold’s filmmaking to feel improvisational without feeling sloppy. For a debut, the composure is almost rude.
It does not top this list because it is an ensemble, and the spotlight is rationed accordingly, but it is the launching pad, and it deserves its second place with no asterisks.
3. Port Authority (2019): Lee, the supporting role with the bite
Danielle Lessovitz’s Port Authority, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2019, is a love story set inside New York’s kiki ballroom scene, and at its center is a young midwesterner named Paul, played by Fionn Whitehead, who falls for Wye, a trans woman in the ballroom community played by Leyna Bloom. It is a small, careful film about how people lie to themselves about who they are.
Lombardi plays Lee, Paul’s cousin and roommate, and the part is engineered to be the uncomfortable one. Lee is the friction in the room, the guy who voices what other characters are too polite to admit. Lombardi could have played him as a villain, all swagger and slurs, and the role would have died on contact. Instead, he plays Lee like a real person whose worldview is small, which is so much sadder and so much more useful to the movie.
The film, produced by Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions alongside Call Me by Your Name outfit RT Features, did not become a household title, but it is the kind of credit that makes other filmmakers call your agent.
4. The Inspection (2022): Harvey, in Elegance Bratton’s boot camp
Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection is one of the most acclaimed indie debuts of the last few years, a semi-autobiographical drama about a young, gay Black man, played by Jeremy Pope, who joins the Marines because rejection from his mother has left him with nowhere else to go. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and arrived through A24 with the kind of festival hum that creates Oscar conversations.
Lombardi plays Harvey, one of the recruits inside the boot camp pressure cooker, and his function in the film is to remind you that institutions like this one are made of individuals making small choices, not of a faceless system. Some of those small choices are cruel, and some are decent, and Lombardi navigates that grey zone with the kind of stillness that costs more than it looks. He is sharing the screen with Pope, Raúl Castillo, Bokeem Woodbine, and Gabrielle Union, and he holds his own, which is the only review that matters.
5. Patti Cake$ (2017): Danny Bagadella, the New Jersey chaos agent
Geremy Jasper’s Patti Cake$ came out of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival like a bottle rocket, was acquired by Fox Searchlight, and closed Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes the same year. The film is a rap underdog story set in working-class New Jersey, anchored by Danielle Macdonald in a star-making turn as Patricia Dombrowski. Lombardi plays Danny Bagadella, and the part is built on swagger and discomfort in roughly equal measure.
It is a smaller role than the four above it, but it is the kind of supporting work that adds texture to a film. Lombardi understands that the music genre needs its loudmouths and its skeptics, and he leans into both without ever crowding the leads. The movie’s reputation has only grown since its release, and Danny is a part of why.
Lesser-Known Roles Worth Pulling Up
There are corners of the Lombardi filmography that festival devotees know about and the rest of the world has not gotten around to yet, and they are quietly some of his most interesting works.
- We the Coyotes (2018), later retitled Anywhere with You, was written, produced, and directed by Hanna Ladoul and Marco La Via, and premiered in the ACID sidebar at Cannes in 2018. Lombardi plays Jake, the male half of a young couple trying to start a life in Los Angeles, and the film is a tender, hangout-shaped portrait of how love and money do not always coexist peacefully. It is small in scale and large in feeling, and Lombardi gets to do warmth, which his other films rarely ask of him.
- Deadland (2023), Lance Larson’s border thriller, gives him a chance to play in a more genre-shaped sandbox alongside Roberto Urbina, Julio Cesar Cedillo, and Chris Mulkey. It is not the strongest film on his resume, but it is the closest he has come to a traditional thriller mode, and watching him work inside genre conventions is genuinely interesting.
- Bodyhackers, Carlos Conceicao’s horror film with Joana Ribeiro and Elina Löwensohn, also has a fun piece of trivia attached to it, in that Lombardi was reportedly the first film actor to be paid in cryptocurrency for the role, which is either a fascinating footnote in industry history or a great pub quiz question, depending on your priors.
Earlier work like Killing Animals (2015), Mindless, and the short Age of the Moon (2015) is harder to find but worth the dig for anyone interested in tracing the line from amateur to festival regular.
What Comes Next
The most honest answer to what is next for McCaul Lombardi is that he is not chasing the kind of stardom. His filmography is the work of an actor who is selecting projects, and the upcoming Gara’s Return suggests more of the same. The likely future is one where he keeps stacking festival credits, keeps being the actor a certain kind of director calls first, and keeps being slightly under-recognized by the people who chart these things.
Which is, if you think about it, the dream. He is a working actor whose work is good. The recognition will catch up, or it will not, and either way, he will be doing the next one.
