The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.

That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.

I wrote a little visual essay about Killers of the Flower Moon and Martin Scorsese protagonists for the New York Times.