Every movie needs a villain — especially the dark, foreboding, noir types like Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn. Based on the 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn follows Lionel Essrog (Norton), a private investigator with Tourette’s syndrome who’s trying to get to the bottom of his mentor, Frank Minna’s (Bruce Willis), murder. He knows that Frank was into some shady New York City business, but only when Lionel starts digging does he realize how far up this scandal goes. It goes all the way to Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) , New York’s foremost developer — a man, as he says in the trailer, who is used to using his power. Moses is not a nice guy, as we can see, and perhaps the worst (or best, depending on how you want to look at it) is that Motherless Brooklyn’s Moses Randolph is indeed based on a real person : New York mega-developer Robert Moses.