Richard Kwietniowski’s Owning Mahowny is absorbing in its joylessness.

For Dan Mahowny (Philip Seymour Hoffman), every breath, every decision, and every neural spark go to gambling. There’s nothing left for anything else. And here “gambling” is distinct from “winning,” because Mahowny is what exultant casino operator Victor Foss calls a “thoroughbred,” the rare high-roller with zero interest in any of the perks casinos usually lavish on their whales: “Do you know why he wants to win? So he has the money to keep losing.” If you need any proof of how far removed Mahowny is from life’s ordinary pleasures, look no further than the fact that his go-to dinner order is dry ribs. Dry!

There is a plot to Owning Mahowny, including an interesting and occasionally beautifully tense look at the rampant bank fraud that Mahowny uses to fund his obsession. His brazen theft is so close to being out in the open, one wrong question or one bit of skepticism away from being revealed completely, that you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Kwietniowski knows it, and with a dry sense of humor, he occasionally gives us scenes where the characters might as well be surrounded by lazily spinning shoe mobiles dangling from fraying threads. It’s going to be now, right? It has to be now! How could it not be now?

But the movie is most engrossing when it’s exploring Mahowny’s laser-focused addiction and the way Foss’s casino practices a kind of professionalized parasitism on him. This is an actors’ movie, and it’s especially grounded by Hoffman and Hurt. Foss feels all the pleasure Mahowny can’t, and Hurt’s performance is delicious, crackling, and exuberant–all in the face of the human misery of one man systematically destroying his life for Foss’s profit. And Hoffman excels at both Mahowny’s compulsive, graceless, and almost spasmodic chasing of the next high–this is a guy who, when he can’t be at the casino, will settle for placing the world’s most haphazard sports bets on “all the home teams” on a given night–and the rare moments when the tide recedes. When that happens, the usually stimulation-numbed Mahowny can, however briefly, touch the world again. He can even connect to someone else, like his loyal, long-suffering girlfriend (Minnie Driver) or the casino waiter he takes a liking to (Chris Collins). He’s genuine in those scenes, and his emotions are real. But he knows, just as we do, that they aren’t his driving force.

Despite being a major Hoffman fan, I’d somehow never watched this. If you’ve made a similar mistake, rectify it at once.

Owning Mahowny is streaming on Tubi.