The Creeps

 

ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (B-minus) - At times fascinating, at times confounding, this exploration of Zambian grief culture is often too arty to sustain its one-note narrative over 95 repetitive minutes. 

 

Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving one night when she spots the body of her uncle in the road. She, her drunken cousin and Shula's manipulative father arrange for the body to be retrieved, and so begins an extended mourning period, during which a really obvious secret will challenge the women of multiple generations as they sit shiva in a crowded house.

Chardy is appealing as the stoic niece dealing with a hen-house full of aunties. Elizabeth Chisela perks things up as the drunken cousin. There is another cousin suffering in a water-logged hospital from what appears to be PTSD. They are chafing against a misogynistic system that is wholly accepted by the aunties (they literally crawl around the house and faithfully serve the whiny men), leaving the younger women to brood and seek small ways to rebel.

Writer-director Rungano Nyoni ("I Am Not a Witch") unwinds a droll and elliptical story, mashing up the languages of Bempa, English and French like she is whipping up a Zambian bouillabaisse. She releases the "secret" of the uncle's actions fitfully but frustratingly. Every other scene seems like it is restarting the story, and while the cultural Easter eggs are enlightening, it feels like she merged a short film with a documentary about the Zambian middle class, watering both down. Shula's shambling excursions can be both funny and touching at times, thanks to Chardy's placid demeanor in any situation.

It is a unique vision, but you have to be in the mood to meander, perhaps muttering under your breath at times for Nyoni to finally get to the bittersweet but underwhelming reveal. This is more about the journey than that destination. 

WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965) (B) - This seedy neo-noir traffics in the era of the screwed-up creep preying on a woman, though there is less violence and more psychodrama surrounding the denizens of a swinging discotheque in Manhattan.

 

Dancer Juliet Prowse (above right) turns in a strong performance as Norah, the victim of a phone stalker, and from the start we are pretty sure that man is co-worker Lawrence, played by a ripped Sal Mineo. Their boss at the dance club is wise-cracking Marian (Elaine Stritch, above left). Norah spins records (mostly the same ones over and over again; presumably the producers could not afford the rights to more tunes) and fends off the creeps (there is the suggestion that prostitution goes on in the back rooms). 

Lawrence lives with his sister, Edie, who is brain damaged, ever since a fall down the stairs as a girl after she witnessed her older brother having sex with an older woman. (That's where the teddy bear comes in.) Meantime, a hard-boiled detective, Lt. Madden (Catskills comedian Jan Murray), seizes the opportunity to track down the stalker, seeing as he is obsessed with sexual deviancy, refusing to hide lurid details of cases from his adolescent daughter, who picks up the salacious cop lingo.

Director Joseph Cates (a veteran of TV comedy) keeps things crackling in modern black-and-white, including street scenes shot on the more lurid side of Times Square. His camera practically drools as it pans across pornographic books or peeks up at store-window mannequins clad in bondage gear.The writers are Leon Tokatyan (who would go on to create the TV show "Lou Grant") and Arnold Drake (an early comic-book superhero aficionado), and they have a flair for throwback potboiler dialogue. 

The film doesn't really hide its gay undertones -- when Marian escorts Norah home, the older woman is perceived to be hitting on her underling, and Mineo is often seen shirtless, either pumping iron in a gym or parading around in tight jeans or swim trunks. Prowse is a perfect foil for all of this sexual decadence. And while there isn't much to the mystery, Cates maintains enough suspense to keep his strong cast battling each other to the end.

Spotted: Daniel J. Travanti (as Dan Travanty), in his big-screen debut, plays Carlo, the mute bouncer at the dance club. He would go on to helm "Hill Street Blues" as Capt. Furillo in the 1980s.

BONUS TRACKS

The groovy rock songs in "Teddy Bear" were written by Four Seasons songwriter Bob Gaudio and Al Kasha ("The Morning After"). There doesn't seem to be a record of the songs or the band performing them. Here is "It Could Have Been Me" with Mineo and Prowse:

 

The other main discotheque number is "Born to be Bad":

Doc Watch: Sammy Maudlin

 

ARE WE GOOD? (B+) - Welcome to your 60s, Marc Maron. As if the comedian/podcaster weren't grumpy enough over the years. 

This documentary tracks Maron -- an admittedly B-list standup -- as he winds down his pioneering podcast "WTF" and moves on from the COVID-era death of his girlfriend, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton. That was a tough blow for him in 2020, having found a true partner after a couple of failed marriages and even more battles with drugs.

 

Here he is, warts and all, a kid from Albuquerque, putting his life in perspective, and as sociology, it can be fascinating at times -- though Maron's self-deprecating crankiness gets a bit old hat across 97 minutes. Maron grapples with an unhappy family history, too, particularly with a gruff, philandering father who now is dealing with dementia, assisted by a younger wife, Rosie (who decades ago was his business assistant). The film's coda places father and son in an Albuquerque diner (Maron is good about coming back to his hometown to look in on the old guy), and it's almost remarkable how unremarkable and anti-climactic the scene is. It lacks either tension or a connection -- just a middle-aged man and his elderly father existing in the same space for a while.

Director Steven Feinartz, a veteran of standup specials, and rookie writer Julie Seabaugh struggle at times to find narrative hooks or a-ha moments that will jump off the screen. Instead, it's slow and steady as she goes, and luckily Maron (depending on your tastes) is an intelligent soul-searcher whose musings connect on a basic level. They assemble some of Maron's comic pals -- including David Cross, John Mulaney, Caroline Rhea and Michaela Watkins -- who explain how far Maron has come from his wilder early years, which included partying with Sam Kinison and displayed through some old stage clips. No one, though, is ever really able to truly capture what exactly made Maron such an asshole back in the day and why they admire is journey as a man.

But Maron does exude a certain rough-hewn charm, even in this maudlin milieu. He is loving to his cats, and he seems to have great taste in music, as reflected on the soundtrack. It might help to connect if you are close to his age and are of a mind to take stock of the events that have unspooled over the decades. My older movie companion and I were heartened.

CODA: As we stood on the sidewalk outside the Guild Cinema breaking down the film, out from the theater toddled an elderly man struggling against a cane, aided by his younger partner. It was Maron's father and Rosie. 

BONUS TRACKS

The soundtrack helps the film build to a crescendo and find closure. That includes "The Ticking Is the Bomb" by Dean Wareham of Luna:

 

The hypnotic "Manhattan" from Chan Marshall as Cat Power:

 

And over the closing credits, Big Thief with "Change":

Mystery Dance

 

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (A-minus) - Filmmaker Jafar Panahi is no longer a political prisoner in Iran, but boy is he still pissed. Like with his previous film, "No Bears," Panahi made his latest without the permission of the government.

 

"It Was Just an Accident" alternates between being a revenge thriller and a bumbling black comedy about former prisoners of Iran's religious autocrats who stumble upon a man believed to be the one-legged interrogator who tortured them during their imprisonment. The plot is set into action by a random car accident that leads the man, known as Peg Leg, to visit an automotive garage, where he is recognized (possibly) by mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri). Vahid is directed to another victim, photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), for help in confirming Peg Leg's identity.

It just so happens that Shiva is taking wedding photographs of a couple, and the bride, Goli (Hadid Pakbaten), is yet another survivor of Peg Leg's who thinks it's him. Finally, the group recruits Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), Shiva's ex, who is the most certain about Peg Leg's identity and must be restrained from attacking the man, who is being held drugged and unconscious in a crate in the back of Vahid's van. Hamid is the source of much of the film's fury and dark humor.

Panahi ("Taxi," "This Is Not a Film") orchestrates this ensemble like a maestro. He directs venom at the regime from a variety of sources. He finely articulates the conundrum created by vengeance. He shows the group performing a kind act for Peg Leg's wife and daughter. Panahi builds suspense like a master. And now that the United States is a country where masked goons kidnap innocent people, the anxiety of totalitarianism resonates throughout "Accident's" taut 104-minute running time.  

WEAPONS (B-minus) - Horror writer-director Zach Cregger is his own worst enemy as he takes an interesting idea and trips all over his fussy plot contrivances. And he takes his two interesting lead actors and keeps them apart way too often. It feels like a lost opportunity.

 

The premise is simple. All but one of the students from teacher Justine Gandy's third-grade class have gone missing, fleeing their homes at 2:17 a.m., arms out like airplane wings, disappearing into the night. Obviously, the parents are suspicious of Gandy (Julia Garner), who privately has a bit of a drinking problem. One parent determined to solve the problem is played by Josh Brolin, who is given way too much screen time to brood over his missing son.

More interesting is a local police officer, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, "Hail, Caesar!"), who has had a fling with Justine, sparking the ire of his girlfriend (fiancee?) Donna (June Diane Raphael), who reins him in. Ehrenreich and Garner ("The Royal Hotel") are the most compelling faces in the movie, but Cregger rips them apart and chooses to balkanize his film by splitting into segments devoted to different characters and by scrambling the time line over and over. He also introduces a junkie (an appealing Austin Abrams), and it's about as much fun hanging out with this junkie as it would be in real life. But the one with the truly "It" factor is Amy Madigan, who is nearly unrecognizable as Gladys, the aunt of the surviving boy. She has a clown-like appearance (to cover up the effects of cancer) and a penchant for hocus-pocus rituals. 

And, lord, is the Crazy Lady character played out at this point. Gladys is doing some sort of voodoo on behalf of her nephew, who still attends school (bullied, of course) and whose parents sit zombie-like on the couch, cloistered behind newspaper-covered windows. All this feels more like a distraction than an active intention to tell a coherent story and solve a basic mystery. Garner and Ehrenreich often disappear for long stretches, and the narrative meanders. (It's odd to see the waifish, child-like Garner play a full-fledged adult -- drinking and having sex -- and you long to see her flesh out her character more; meantime, Ehrenreich is similarly hand-cuffed in his ability to develop a persona.)

It does not help that "Weapons" is yet another movie that cannot justify a running time of more than two hours. It's a sloppy mess that takes way too long to reach its inevitable, underwhelming conclusion, though a climactic rampage of students, wildly photographed, is worth sticking around for.

BONUS TRACK

"Weapons" has a retro soundtrack that tries too hard to please hipster uncles. The initial disappearance of the children is scored to George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness":

 

Of more recent vintage is "Don't Be Scared" by the Handsome Family:

 

Elvis Costello, with our unrelated title track:

Teenage Wasteland

THIRTEEN (2003) (A-minus) - Twenty-two years later, Catherine Hardwicke's brazen debut still feels like a daring provocation. It is an urgent adolescent wail but with an intense focus on how a divorced mother copes with a girl's initial flirtation with growing up. And that may be Holly Hunter's finest moment.

 

Hunter plays Melanie, a hipster mom who is clinging to her sobriety as she tries to make ends meet styling hair in her kitchen. Evan Rachel Wood is her 13-year-old daughter, Tracy, who at the beginning of the film is quite girlish, with her dorky clothes and stuffed animals. But at school she soon catches the attention of Evie (Nikki Reed), who looks and acts like an adult. Soon Tracy has ditched her loyal pals for Evie's gang of bad girls -- who are into drinking, drugs, shopping (stealing), piercings and older boys. 

The transformation may seem startling at first, but even 22 years ago 13-year-old girls were susceptible to the allure of adulthood, or at least the juvenile-delinquent simulacrum of growing fierce and independent. Melanie and her ex-husband have never had a solid grip on Tracy's behavior (she has been secretly cutting herself). And Melanie has no good tools to deal with a rebellious young girl. Especially when Melanie is determined to stay sober (what was she like as a teen?) and has her own needs to fulfill -- Jeremy Sisto is fantastic as Mel's boomeranging boyfriend who is fresh out of rehab. Tracy seethes at her mother's display of sexuality and co-dependency while aspiring to those exact same goals.

Hardwicke (who would make the big leagues with the "Twilight" movies) shoots guerrilla-style, and her camera itself is giddy as it races through a lean L.A. with these rampaging teens, their still-forming brains besieged by hormones. Meantime, the household is suffocating, especially when Evie, fleeing an irresponsible parental guardian, moves into Tracy's bedroom and the boyfriend crashes with Melanie. 

Reed, who is a commanding screen presence, co-wrote the script with Hardwicke, based on her own experiences. (Hardwicke once dated her father. Reed was 15 when the film came out; Wood had just turned 16.) The story juggles both the exploitation of young women's bodies and the girls' hedonistic (if misunderstood) desire for freedom. Gritty is an overused word, but the milieu here -- working class, marred by abuse and addiction -- is raw and real. Melanie is on her last nerve throughout, often on the verge of a breakdown, and she is willfully blind to how Tracy suddenly came into all the clothes and bling, not to mention the cries for help that emanate from Tracy's Nine Inch Nails-style poetry.

At the climax of the film, when the scales fall from Melanie's eyes, her maternal instincts are feral and her love pure and absolute. It takes an awful lot for a wild teenage girl to break her mother's will. Melanie might have her limitations as a parent, but you cannot doubt her devotion. Everyone will need to be wrung out at the end of this emotional bobsled race.

BANTU MAMA (2022) (B) - From the underbelly of L.A. to the slums of Santo Domingo ... this one also features drugs and bad behavior and kids acting like adults -- in this case truly necessary for survival.

French traveler Emma (Clarisse Albrecht) is busted with drugs in her suitcase during a vacation to the Dominican Republic. She manages to escape police custody and flee to a barrio in Santo Domingo. She is a light-skinned Cameroonian who somewhat blends in with the local population, and she hides out in the home of three children, whose mother is dead and whose father is in jail. And so she mothers them. The older boy is a young adult who hangs out with gangsters. The adolescent younger boy, Cuki, respond to Emma's nurturing. The middle child is Tina (Scarlet Reyes), a young teen who wheels and deals like a mobster, providing for the family. 

 

Tina, using the threat of her incarcerated father, pressures a lawyer to help Emma escape, with the hope that Emma will take young Cuki with her and rescue him from a future of poverty and violence. Reyes is the beating heart of this film by director Ivan Herrera. She is like a street cat, surviving by her wits and claws. Emma's simple act of teaching Tina how to wrap her hair in a bandanna offers the girl a modicum of dignity amid the chaos. 

Albrecht -- who co-wrote the script -- is an elegant presence, keeping calm while bonding with her makeshift new family and awaiting escape. Emma has left a pet parrot behind in France, and she and Herrera use artsy shots of birds in the sky to drive home both that sense of neglect and her yearning for freedom, a return to middle-class comfort. This is a slim 77-minute movie that knows its characters and where they're going.

BONUS TRACKS

"Thirteen" has an edgy alternative soundtrack, including the sultry "Nicotine" by Annette Ducharme (who goes by ANET):

 

Over the closing credits, Liz Phair, from 1993, with "Explain It to Me":

 

Our title track, Robert Pollard joining Pearl Jam for a cover of the Who's "Baba O'Reilly":

 

 

Doc Watch: Fade to Black and White (Ode to Mrs. Smith)

 

THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR (B+) - This energetic documentary is driven by police body-camera footage as it recounts the battle between a cranky middle-aged woman and the neighbors she relentlessly harasses, focused mostly on kids playing near her home during summer break.

The miserable woman -- most of us might recognize the type; growing up, our baseball-confiscating neighbor was Mrs. Smith -- happens to be white and most of the residents around her are black. Tensions are always high, and she is a frequent caller to the local Florida police department. There are so many calls, that officers are on a first-name basis with many of the folks, and there is enough body-cam video to stitch together a full narrative of the events that lead to violence and consequences.  

Filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir, in fact, might be too in love with the gimmick -- a little too faithful to the body-camera footage, which sometimes can muffle dialogue or create confusion among the characters, sometimes blurred out. But as shtick, it's effective, and the story is compelling. This neighborhood "Karen" suffers from irrational fears, though you can't help thinking that the kids, at times, are toying with her.

The jittery cameras -- especially when an emergency occurs -- ratchet up the tension. It is tough to watch a father have to break bad news to his children and console them. It is also fascinating to watch the woman in question, Susan, reckon with the fallout of what happens. Interrogation-room scenes become curious psychological studies, matching any TV procedural. Gandbhir curates a sharp examination of how Americans struggle to live side by side in peace (and quiet).

REBEL ROYALS: AN UNLIKELY LOVE STORY (C-minus) - There is an interesting premise here, but this cheap production about a European princess marrying a gay American con man (and ex-con) never rises above a bland tale of fish-out-of-water true love. 

 

Rebecca Chaiklin, coming off her success with the Netflix series "The Tiger King," offers up an odd combination of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and "Real Housewives of Oslo." She introduces us to Norway's Princess Martha Louise, a divorced mom who is willing to shed her royal duties in order to wed Durek Verrett, a self-styled shaman who scans as gay, though he claims to be bisexual. He also is black, and Chaiklin has plenty of opportunities to photograph him surrounded by a sea of white Norwegian faces.

The film opens with promise, as Verrett is quite the dandy and a tantalizing leading man who might have ulterior motives, and Martha, with her teen and young-adult daughters, is a sympathetic human face of an exhausted celebrity. But we're playing in the minor leagues here -- this isn't exactly the House of Windsor or the love story of Edward and Wallis. And the final third of the movie is indistinguishable from your basic basic-cable wedding-planner reality show. 

Verrett's diva act and new-age snake-oil antics grow weary, and it's difficult to get as jazzed about this "romance" as the tabloid-hungry Norwegians seem to get. It feels like the one who scammed here is Chaiklin, who probably thought she had a sizzling story to tell.

New to the Queue

 The storm before the calm ...

Lynne Ramsay ("Morvern Callar," "We Need to Talk About Kevin") snags Jennifer Lawrence for a dark post-partum relationship tussle, "Die My Love."

Jafar Panahi ("Jafar Panahi's Taxi," "No Bears") loosens up a bit with his latest guerrilla release, "It Was Just an Accident." 

A documentary about the sexually adventurous singer from the aughts, the artist behind the 2003 album "Fatherfucker," "Peaches Goes Bananas."

We'll participate a third time in the guilty pleasure of Rian Johnson's throwback series, "Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery."

A documentary about Jule Campbell, the photographer behind the notorious Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, "Beyond the Gaze."

BONUS TRACK

Peaches with "Bag It":

 

An Incomplete Pass

 

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (C) - I don't know if Wes Anderson has lost it -- or if he has just lost me. When you break a habit as a consumer, it can be difficult to rekindle the previous ardor for that product. Anderson used to be one of our favorite directors. We walked out of his last film, and barely tolerated this latest fussy production.

 

Anderson twee aesthetic, combined with his granular storytelling, has grown exhausting. "The Phoenician Scheme" is fascinating to look at -- mesmerizing patterns of meticulous design throughout -- but confusing to follow. Benicio del Toro stars as old-timey industrialist and arms dealer Zsa-Zsa Korda, who has a Rasputin quality to him -- he has survived multiple plane crashes and other attempts on his life. The latest has him thinking of his life's work and his estranged daughter, Liesl (nepo baby Mia Threapleton), who is a novice nun, and whom he reconnects with in order to serve as his main heir. (In typical Andersonian fashion, Korda also has a boatload of sons that he mostly neglects.)

Thus is unleashed the most needlessly complicated plots, wherein Korda plots his most elaborate scheme, involving the rebuilding of the fictitious region of Phoenicia while rival governments pull a global industrial maneuver to bankrupt Korda, who must then engage, sequentially, with his oddball investors to trick them into overcoming the looming financial debacle.

In tow with Korda and Liesl is Bjorn (Michael Cera), who purports to be a tutor for the boys (his specialty is entomology) and also serves as Korda's right-hand man. Bjorn pines for Liesl, whose vows are perpetually being challenged. All the while, Korda also experiences near-death hallucinations, which involve black-and-white excursions to something resembling ancient Greece or Egypt, with Bill Murray playing God (and making zero impact here). This will eventually lead to a confrontation with Korda's half-brother Nubar, played with villainous glee by Benedict Cumberbatch. As you'd expect, the cast if stuffed with ringers -- Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Willem Dafoe all elbow each other for goofball bragging rights.

I broke this up into three half-hour screenings, and each one felt like a heavy lift. It is only mildly funny, especially compared with Anderson's films of 20-plus years ago, which also were full of much heart and character development. Here, Del Toro and others grind out machine-gun dialogue in that flat affect that afflicts most characters; it's a bit like how Woody Allen kept writing the same movie over and over and just had younger actors take on his cadences and phrasings, no matter how beaten into the ground the whole shtick was. A clever coda here teases the idea of a much more interesting father-daughter tale.

Anderson has always been one to create unique worlds, full of quirk and wonder. These days he spends years and millions of dollars wallowing in his punctilious world-building and overstuffing his scripts with minutiae that still amusing him but leaves many of us numb to this cartoon-like existence. 

ROOFMAN (Incomplete) - We gave this shaggy dog story about a clever criminal close to an hour, and there still was more than an hour to go, so we bailed.  It just can't sustain its run time, despite the presence of Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst and Peter Dinklage. It didn't help that the narrative -- based on a true story -- often did not make sense and seemed like typical Hollywood gilding of a true story.

Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, an Army veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division with practical MacGyver-like skills. To provide for his wife, daughter and son, he starts robbing McDonald's venues by entering through the roof, waiting for the crew to arrive in the morning, locking them in the cooler, and making off with the previous days' proceeds. He gets caught, goes to jail, breaks out, and takes up residence in a Toys R Us, eventually getting bold enough to venture outside, where he has a meet-cute with one of the Toys R Us employees, Leigh (Dunst), at her church's toy-drive event. (He has set up baby monitors in the store's office, so he overhears Dinklage's boss interacting with Leigh.)

That's as far as we get in the first hour. That's a lot of time for set-up. The McDonald's heist at the beginning is the funniest part of the film, and you can see that in the trailer, mostly. There simply is no reason why a movie like this needs to be two hours and six minutes long. There was little promise that Tatum and Dunst (pretty flat in the first half) were about to set the picture on fire. 

In addition, the idiot plot (albeit based on real life), got harder and harder to bear. There is a stray distracting story about a former army comrade (Lakeith Stanfield) that was going nowhere, and the way Jeffrey is seen romping around the store every night making a mess, it's a wonder that he was able to cover his tracks for as long as he did, raising suspicions only by the amount of M&Ms he was consuming. And the real Manchester apparently duped the unwitting Leigh for quite a while, although the way he is presented here -- looking unemployed and homeless -- it seems incredulous that they would strike up a relationship (even if it happened, in some form, in real life). 

Tatum is a fun actor, but he has little to play off here. This is a lethargic offering from Derek Cianfrance ("Blue Valentine," "The Place Beyond the Pines"), who now seems well past his prime. The production overall felt a bit cheap, and the performances are subdued. The whole crew needed to pep this up and bring it in under 100 minutes. That extra half hour is a killer. 

Am I Blue?

 

BLUE MOON (A) - Rarely will you find a movie that so earnestly and elegantly captures emotional longing -- as well as the yearning for love and acceptance -- as this endlessly clever and charming tale of the bittersweet final days of Lorenz Hart, the celebrated lyricist from a century ago.

 

 

Ethan Hawke turns in a career performance as Hart, whose alcoholism has mostly destroyed his songwriting partnership with Richard Rodgers, who has moved on to team with another lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein, and it is their Broadway opening of "Oklahoma!" that provides the setting for the film during one night at a Manhattan bar, the legendary Sardi's. Hart is the personification of glib, and Hawke unleashes one-liners and monologues as if he were in a one-man show. He amuses himself and others, although some have grown a little tired of his shtick.

Richard Linklater can do no wrong in re-creating wartime Manhattan and delving into the busy mind of the celebrated songwriter who is destined on this night to yet again lose his battle with the bottle. I'm enjoying Linklater's middle-aged swerve to the mainstream, perhaps finally realizing that he no longer is the indie auteur of classics like "Slacker," "Dazed and Confused," and "Before Sunrise." Like his 2003 romp "School of Rock" and the recent "Hit Man," "Blue Moon" lets Linklater relax a little into a rich character study that appeals to the masses. It's a return from the wilderness and the meandering of films like "Boyhood" and "Everybody Wants Some."

This is the first full screenplay by Robert Kaplow, a novelist, whose "Me and Orson Welles" was brought to the screen by Linklater in 2009. Kaplow stuffs the script with cunning wordplay and sharp insight into one man's damaged psyche. Some might find the dialogue overwhelming at times; I found it to be deft and insightful, welcoming Kaplow's challenge to keep up with it. I can't begin to do it justice with excerpted quotes. Suffice it to say that Hart's apoplexy over the exclamation point in "Oklahoma!" will warm the heart of any former copy editor or critic of modern punctuation usage.

Hawke presents Hart as a lovable loudmouth, full of empty boasts and headed for a fall (he would be dead within months, later in 1943). He is a small man and he knows it; Linklater has fun bundling Hawke into a suit that dwarfs him and engaging in camera tricks that make him appear to be the size of a boy barely able to belly up to the bar. His comb-over and cigar peg him as a Tin Pan Alley has-been, and his empty swagger seems both earned but well past its due date.

Hawke has a fine cast to bounce off of, most notably Bobby Canavale as a Jackie Gleason-like foil. John Lees provides a tinkling Greek chorus as the house piano player, a nice Jewish boy on leave from the service. A platinum-coifed Margaret Qualley swans about as Hart's college-student protege who is angling for an audience with Rodgers, eyeing the possibilities for her career (and perhaps more). She has a focus here that she has lacked in other projects.

But this is Hawke's show. He carries the first 20 minutes with a motor-mouthed monologue during which he holds court and unleashes a torrent of pithy philosophy, to the amusement of the stragglers at the bar. He briefly befriends E.B. White, the New Yorker writer who until then was nursing a drink in a booth, quiet as a mouse. (Linklater and Kaplow insist on dropping little Easter eggs into the script -- Hart will give White an idea for an iconic children's book, and Hart will have passing interactions with nobodies who will go on to be a famous songwriter and a noted movie director. Blink and you'll miss a reference to New York street photographer Weegee.)

In the end, I fell hard for the rat-a-tat dialogue and the authentic emotion of Hart pouring his heart out -- to a pretty young gal he idealizes or to a lifelong pal and writing partner whose approval he craves. What an imaginative period piece and a magical moment in time. 

BONUS TRACKS

Much of the Rodgers & Hart catalog is rendered as incidental music, courtesy of the piano player in the bar, but some songs get fuller studio workouts, like "This Funny World," as interpreted by Tony Bennett:

 

For me, the definitive version of "Blue Moon" is by Elvis Presley from the Sun Sessions:

 

Then there is the '90s reimagining from "Cowboy Junkies," featuring Margo and Michael Timmins:

 

And our title track (not from Rodgers and Hart), courtesy of Billie Holiday: