Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: Don DeLillo's appealing "Game 6," plus a misbegotten footnote to the JT Leroy pseudo-scandal
Michael Hoffman's "Game 6" has been kicking around the indie-film scene for a couple of years now, never quite finding a way into the marketplace. Given its fine cast and the fact that it was written by Don DeLillo, the revered novelist who has never previously scribbled a screenplay (or at least had one produced), you had to figure that meant it stank. Well, guess again. This fable about a middle-aged playwright facing a life crisis, a hostile critic, a series of abortive taxi rides and the infamous -- for Red Sox fans -- sixth game of the 1986 World Series is a modest but agreeable, and often very funny, movie.

It's true that DeLillo's hyper-literate prose doesn't always translate well into dialogue, and an early diner conversation between playwright Nicky Rogan (Michael Keaton) and his half-estranged daughter, Laurel (Ari Graynor), feels so dense I thought we were in for a long evening. But Nicky is a winning character -- like all Red Sox fans, a little misanthropic and fatalistic, but with some tragic sweetness at his core -- and Keaton gives one of his finest performances. "Game 6" also offers nice supporting roles for Griffin Dunne (as Nicky's even more defeated best friend) and the irrepressible Robert Downey Jr., as the Buddhist ninja critic feared and loathed by all New York playwrights.

Perhaps non-baseball lovers simply won't be interested in Nicky's internal dramas as the deadly Game Six and, secondarily, his most personal play's opening night approach on the same October day. But even if you know all too well what happened in that game between the Red Sox and the New York Mets, DeLillo and Hoffman make it seem both dramatic and momentous. I'm not wowed by the spoofy "Taxi Driver" resolution, but for fans of DeLillo, Keaton and/or either team in that classic Series, this curious little picture is worth tracking down.

Opens March 10 in New York and other major cities.

I feel somewhat less compassion for Asia Argento, director and star of "The Heart Is Deceitful in All Things," an ill-starred adaptation of the novel by hipster icon JT Leroy (recently revealed to be a 40-year-old San Francisco woman named Laura Albert, rather than a semi-transgendered Appalachian truck-stop hustler). But that's not to say I don't feel any. The movie is terrible, but made with verve and sincerity, all of it pointed in the wrong direction.

The film's distributors are understandably trying to spin this Gothic opus of bad sex, bad drugs and bad rock 'n' roll as some kind of meta-commentary on, or at least an interesting secondary artifact of, the literary scandal. But they can't succeed, goodness knows. All we've got here is a stereotype of hyper-Christian, hyper-hypocritical and hyper-violent America more false, more cartoonish and more flat-out stupid than anything the genuine darkness of violent, hypocritical Christian America could produce. That, and further evidence that hip celebrities by the wagonload -- Winona Ryder, Michael Pitt, Marilyn Manson, Lydia Lunch and Peter Fonda all appear here, in minor roles -- were seduced by the lure of Leroy's supposedly true chronicles of degeneracy.

Would it matter much if Leroy's books were good? And are they, in fact? Well, it would matter less, but the entire point of the Leroy persona was that this person had survived hideous ordeals at the hands of our most benighted fellow Amurrcans, and had risen to craft lambent, Rimbaud-like prose penetrating our collective heart of darkness. I don't know Laura Albert, but it seems her own story may have been almost as interesting, if less conveniently packaged, than JT Leroy's. While her writing is powerful in patches (and deliriously overcooked in others), the truth it supposedly illuminates about life in these United States mostly preys on its target audience's worst prejudices and superstitions. Given the ample horrors this land indeed can offer, that's inexcusable, and the bicoastal scenester clowns duped by her don't feel half as ashamed as they should.

I guess Argento's hallucinatory film may have some value as a document of delusion, as well as an assemblage of every drug-montage and rape-montage cliché ever staged. Argento herself plays the feckless hooker mama of Jeremiah (played mostly by twin brothers Dylan and Cole Sprouse), fictional stand-in for the fictional Leroy; the only way I can describe her performance is to suggest that if Paris Hilton impersonated Courtney Love, this is roughly what you'd get. The Bible is quoted extensively. There's a CGI sequence involving lumps of talking coal. Winona Ryder plays a shrink who mimes one puppet anally raping another. That's all I can remember, mercifully.

Opens March 10 in New York and Los Angeles, March 17 in Chicago, March 24 in Cambridge, Mass., and San Francisco, April 7 in Seattle, April 14 in Washington and April 17 in Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.

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