Jimmy Hollywood movie review & film summary (1994)

That sets up the story gimmick in "Jimmy Hollywood," which is that Jimmy teams up with William to tape the bad guys, send the tapes to TV stations, and represent himself as a shadowy vigilante organization named "S.O.S." - which stands for "Save Our Streets" and is inspired, he explains, by the initials of "Steven O. Selznick," whose name was David, but why sweat the details? Leadership of the S.O.S. is the greatest role in Jimmy Alto's life, and he plays it to the hilt, monopolizing the Los Angeles media with a crimestoppers campaign that grows more daring and dangerous.

Lorraine (Victoria Abril), his longsuffering Latina girlfriend, thinks he has taken leave of his senses, which of course he has, but the movie knows that an unemployed actor who thinks he has finally found a great role cannot be reasoned with.

"Jimmy Hollywood" was written and directed by Barry Levinson ("Rainman," "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who has probably had a lot of Jimmy Altos through his office. In Pesci, Slater and Abril he has actors who find the right tone for the material. But the plot weighs them down. They'd be at home in a human comedy about their dreams and other ways of killing time. When they get caught up in the whirlwind of Levinson's plot mechanism, they lose their goofy street credibility and become characters in a sitcom: Events drive them, and the scale of the story escalates, until finally nothing can be believed - which is a shame, because for the first hour we believed in them.

John Cassavetes knew how to make movies like this without letting the plot take over. His "Minnie and Moskowitz" was about a lonely museum curator (Gena Rowlands) and a parking lot attendant (Seymour Cassel), and Moskowitz could be Jimmy Alto's first cousin: A guy on the outside physically, but on the inside in his mind. The whole point of such characters is that they drift. And it is important that they drift in a recognizable version of real life (romanticized, to be sure).

"Jimmy Hollywood" goes wrong when Jimmy starts pulling off stunts that would make you famous in the movies but would get you killed in real life. Once the story cuts loose from its base of realism, it doesn't much matter what happens; Jimmy, William and Lorraine, who seemed so real in her cluttered apartment, become plot devices, not people.