Anyone who has ever attended a writers’ workshop (guilty!) will recognize the characters in Click|keyword[Stephen+Weitz]” href=”http://www.westword.com/related/to/Stephen+Weitz/” title=”Stephen Weitz”>Stephen Weitz, Click|keyword[John+Ashton]” href=”http://www.westword.com/related/to/John+Ashton/” title=”John Ashton”>John Ashton (a Westword staff writer decades ago) is a suitably foul-mouthed and morally ambiguous Leonard, and Click|keyword[Devon+James]” href=”http://www.westword.com/related/to/Devon+James/” title=”Devon James”>Devon James makes Kate pleasantly disheveled, accomplishing an interesting transformation toward the end, and as Izzie, Click|keyword[Sean+Scrutchins]” href=”http://www.westword.com/related/to/Sean+Scrutchins/” title=”Sean Scrutchins”>Sean Scrutchins, he becomes almost incoherently so.
The blacker the humor, the more interesting the action, so it’s a shame things get serious and a touch sentimental toward the end, with Leonard and Martin alone together, admiring each others’ work and expressing their mutual love for language and literature. There is a saving grace, though, an implied sting in the tail: just the hint of a suggestion that if Martin chooses to walk through the door to a writer’s life Leonard is holding invitingly open for him, he’ll find he has struck a Faustian bargain.
