Director Keith Gordon emphasizes the speeches more than other issues, and his otherwise thoughtful movie needlessly romanticizes hate.

Does the film work? Not really. It loses itself in comic caricatures of the loonies that Campbell meets in New York; and its melodramatic double-reverses, by making the plot seem arbitrary, rob it of importance.

A serious drama that is also funny without crossing into burlesque.

A fine, melancholy adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel, with Nick Nolte in peak, vulnerable form.