Tom Cruise is done with action heroism — at least for the moment directly in front of him.

Cruise’s new movie Digger is many things, but the trailers are correct in flagging that it is not a typical action movie, and Cruise does not play a stoically death-defying hero in it. He’s covered in prosthetics used to make him look, well, much closer to his actual age of 64 than he appears in real life, as a wealthy and powerful oil man who may have to answer for an environmental disaster.

Though Cruise recently announced another fountain-of-youth project in the form of a Days of Thunder sequel, and supposedly intends to make a third Top Gun at some point, Digger puts him back on a different form of high wire. It’s his first movie without some kind of action-adventure hook since American Made, a 2017 dramatic thriller currently streaming on HBO Max.

Technically, American Made is also one of the lowest-grossing Cruise movies… well, ever, actually, but certainly in the past 35 years of his career. The only Cruise films since the ’90s that have dipped lower in North America are Lions for Lambs, Rock of Ages, and Magnolia, two-thirds of which were hampered by bad reviews and all of which were sold more as ensemble pictures than straight-up star vehicles. (Yes, that attempt to turn The Mummy into a new Dark Universe franchise actually sold more tickets than its fellow 2017 release American Made.) This doesn’t mean that American Made was an outright flop; for an adult-driven movie with less in the way of stunts or visual effects than most of Cruise’s post-2010 output, it did respectable business. If it made the same amount of money this year, it would seem pretty successful in a post-pandemic market that is flukier and less friendly to mid-budget movies than ever. Moreover, this film provides one of the past decade’s only brief windows into what a post-action Cruise career might look like.

Specifically, American Made is a fascinating throwback to the ’80s that winds up playing like an alternate version of, or even rebuke to, the high-flying theatrics of Top Gun, then and now and forever Cruise’s signature smash. Cruise plays the real-life figure Barry Seal, another pilot — only this time he flies commercial jets, and we join him feeling so bored of his regional-flight routine that he intentionally causes a little turbulence to wake up his dozing co-pilot. He also does some low-key side-gig smuggling of small contraband packages — Cuban cigars, basically — which attracts the attention of the CIA. They hire Barry as kind of a freelancer to fly daredevil reconnaissance missions over Central America. Eventually, he’s serving as an agency bagman and, in an illicit side gig reminiscent of his original cigar delivery, a drug smuggler. That last part isn’t at the behest of the CIA, though they don’t seem to much care either way so long as he’s delivering for them, too. (At one point, they gift him an airport and acres of surrounding land.)  Other agencies, however, feel differently, and eventually Barry is in a mess of trouble.

Cruise fans who maybe got a little wary of the increasingly messianic tone of recent Mission: Impossible adventures might take some solace in American Made, where he’s playing a far less virtuous character. Barry isn’t exactly predisposed to a life of crime, but he confesses in a series of direct-to-camera VHS recordings that partially frame his story that he does tend to “leap without looking,” and not quite in that dashing Ethan Hunt sort of way. He’s working to support his wife and kids, and genuinely doesn’t seem interested in the glamour or women or power often associated with the drug trade. But he does want more of a thrill than he gets as a commercial pilot; it’s his Top Gun “need for speed” unleashed in the capitalist society he blandly flew/fought/whatever for in those less complicated movies.

American Made was directed by Doug Liman, one of many directors — Steven Spielberg, Cameron Crowe, Joseph Kosinski — who has done two movies with Cruise without yet making it to a third. (Only Christopher McQuarrie, his later-period Mission: Impossible guy, has done directed three or more Cruise pictures.) Liman’s other Cruise project is Edge of Tomorrow, which is probably his best pure performance of the past 20 years or so, seamlessly merging the youthful callowness he used to play so regularly with some middle-aged slick cowardice, his action-hero bona fides, and even the sometimes-dicey love story, in the form of his clear adoration of the Emily Blunt character in that film.

American Made isn’t quite so clear about Barry Seal beyond his Maverick-style love of zipping through whatever airspace he can, legality be damned. Before his damage-control reset circa 2010 or so, Cruise made movies like Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, and War of the Worlds that peeled back his characters’ bravado and charm to reveal something more damaged underneath. Here Cruise wears a certain familiar set of expressions — his dawning-realization face usually reserved for recalibrating his plan when some of his impossible-mission gear malfunctions, or processing the betrayal of a colleague; his politely tentative smile while he assess a situation — as a kind of mildly befuddled armor. He’s not the self-impressed slickster of his youth, but he’s not exactly reckoning with his own carelessness, either. He wears his Maverick-like aviator shades as a deflector, bouncing away any Scorsese-style spiritual excavation and helping keep the whole thing closer to the level of those intoxicating, but not especially insightful, crime pictures like Blow.

That’s not nothing; Liman and Cruise keep American Made humming with such energy that it doesn’t necessarily need to burrow any further to work (though it does indulge some crime-story clichés, like the loose-cannon associate who costs our anti-hero plenty of money and more, and the government betrayals that fail to keep our man safe from the bad guys when he decides to make a deal). They just don’t fully unlock the character the way they did in Edge of Tomorrow, maybe because that movie had its spectacle as its own form of shield.

The way that American Made doesn’t quite locate the inner Barry Seal may prove informative about where Cruise ultimately heads now that his stuntman days seem to be, if not over, at least somewhat limited. Since the whole couch-jumping escapade of the mid-2000s, Cruise has been more guarded in public, and to some extent that’s crossed over to his acting, too. That lends itself well to action heroes; it renders many of her more grounded characters oddly (if interestingly) opaque. Cruise Guys like Barry Seal wind up looking strangely unknowable just by virtue of the actor playing them so charismatically, while keeping their dawning realizations to themselves.

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.

Stream American Made on HBO Max