Joe Gould's Secret

For a practicing journalist the ultimate horror movie might be the story of Joseph Mitchell; he showed up for work one day at the New Yorker, sat down at his desk, and suffered writer's block for 32 years. Before that, however, he was hot stuff, noted especially for a story he wrote about Joe Gould, Manhattan barfly, raconteur, and reputed author of a multi-volume in-progress "Oral History of Our Time." This is natural material for Stanley Tucci, the actor-turned-director who dazzled with his debut, Big Night, in which artistic perfection -- culinary in that case -- supersedes acknowledgment or immortality. His touching but unemphatic Joe Gould's Secret is like a ruminative cordial following that hectic feast.

Played in an unwashed, scenery-chewing performance by Ian Holm, Gould is the artist as anarchic fool -- Charles Bukowski by way of Gulley Jimson with a touch of a flea-bitten James Joyce -- who cadges from the arty Greenwich Village crowd on the power of his ongoing project and his zesty egotism. As Mitchell, Tucci is as mild-mannered and top-coated and happily-familied (Hope Davis plays yet another supportive wife) as one of his publication's dour cartoons, the antithesis of Gould but also, perversely, his complement. The success of Mitchell's story about Gould puts pressure on both to produce -- and in the end, perhaps, Mitchell realizes his most hideous link with Gould is that neither has anything to say. Tucci's movie does, however, if only in its depiction of how pleasant Manhattan in the '40s must have been to stroll through, and its assurance that human contact is preferable to the loneliness of genius.

-- Peter Keough