The Great Buck Howard

This film is a lightweight but pleasant film that is bursting with affection. Write and director Sean McGinly briefly served as a road manager for the Amazing Kreskin, a "mentalist" who was a ubiquitous talk-show guest in the 1970s, and it's clear that McGinly both loved and hated him, but mostly loved.

For anyone old enough to remember Kreskin, the similarities are apparent. The crippling hand-shake, the precise enunciation of the patter, and the signature trick of letting the audience hide his performance fee--if he can't find it, he forfeits it. There's a title card at the end of the picture thanking Kreskin for the inspiration--maybe it's also to hold off a lawsuit.

I say that because McGinly's Buck Howard is not a cuddly figure. John Malkovich plays him with magnificent verve, and is a joy to behold. Howard is reduced to performing in small cities to half-filled auditoriums, but he never fails to give a good show, and somehow manages to be both a glad-hander and a man who suffers no fools.

Colin Hanks is the stand in for McGinly, a bland character who has dropped out of law school, much to the disappointment of his father (Colin's real dad, a sometime actor named Tom). Looking for adventure, he takes a job with Howard as his road manager, and rides the rollercoaster of Howard's rage and his praise, which can sometimes happen within the same minute. Hanks rolls with it, and carries a respect for his employer, and can never figure out how he does the hidden pay trick. He is also repeatedly asked about Howard's sexual orientation, another mystery. Nothing is said about Howard's hairstyle.

Things get complicated at a big gig in Cincinnati, when Howard hopes to revive his flagging career by performing a big stunt. He hires a publicist (Emily Blunt), but she constantly lets him down, as well as entering into an obligatory relationship with Hanks. Things go horribly wrong, but Howard ends up getting an extra fifteen minutes of fame, which gets him back on TV and a deal with a Vegas casino, but it's clear that Howard just wasn't made for these times.

This is not a hard-hitting film, it's a relaxing and occasionally amusing hour and a half that is a tip of the derby to a byegone era of entertainment. The screenplay is over earnest, with way too much voice-over narration by Hanks (including the dreaded "it was then that I realized" ). The film is also packed with celebrity cameos, from Martha Stewart to Gary Coleman. So many real-life talk-show hosts show up that I'm baffled as to how Larry King avoided being in this. This is more distracting than anything else, although I did smile at the eventual appearance of Jay Leno, who Howard refers to as "Satan."

If you have a nostalgia for the old days of TV in the Mike Douglas Show era, or want to see a finely-etched performance by Malkovich, this could be worth your while. Like the main character, it's a film that is hard to hate.