How John Malkovich’s 30-Year Oscar Drought Could Finally End With ‘Wild Horse Nine’

John Malkovich could finally have an Oscar secret weapon, and his name is Martin McDonagh. The ensemble is deep and soars — Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Parker Posey, Chilean breakout star Mariana Di Girolamo — but the film rests on its firm two-hander: Sam Rockwell and, in the performance generating the loudest awards buzz, Malkovich. A McDonagh movie arrives with automatic awards gravity, and he’s earned it.

But the most intriguing Oscar question around “Wild Horse Nine” may not be best picture-related at all. It’s simpler: Is it finally Malkovich time? He has two Oscar nominations, both in supporting actor — for “Places in the Heart” in 1984 and “In the Line of Fire” in 1993 — and he lost both.

Then, essentially, the conversation stopped. None of it brought him back to the Academy’s acting conversation. For more than three decades he has made movies, television and theater, delivering some of the most indelible performances of his generation without once returning to the Academy’s radar.

That absence is exactly what makes “Wild Horse Nine” such a fascinating vehicle for a comeback. McDonagh’s films are populated by characters who are funny because they’re wounded, dangerous because they’re ridiculous and tragic because they can’t quite grasp what they want. Malkovich, dropped into that tonal universe, has an almost unfair advantage.

His signature gifts — menace at a whisper, deadpan absurdity, theatrical precision, and the knack for making even the strangest line land like an anvil. The role could become a classic overdue narrative without asking voters to engage in revisionist history. He has already been there.

He just hasn’t been back since the Reagan and Clinton administrations. The Academy has always had an appetite for career reassessments, especially when an established actor lands in the right filmmaker’s hands — see Gary Oldman in “Darkest Hour.” But Malkovich isn’t walking in needing voters to discover him. He needs them to remember what made him singular in the first place, and McDonagh may be the filmmaker best positioned to jog that memory.