Bart Layton's film tells the story of a real-life robbery that went badly wrong-while mixing in interviews with the actual perpetrators. Why did four privileged college students decide, in 2004, to pull off a violent art robbery at Kentucky's Transylvania University, despite their lack of criminal expertise? That's the underlying mystery of Bart Layton's American Animals , a too-cute cross between a heist movie and a true-crime documentary that ends up borrowing the worst traits of both.