Critics reviews

Seemingly improvised by two method actors, “Mikey and Nicky” was totally scripted. To watch Cassavetes and Falk inhabit their roles is to watch two great jazz musicians riffing on a score.

What the director and actors are doing here – it’s what people call a “high wire act,” and the artists walk it bravely. And it is, at times, astonishing.

[May’s] genius for finding the squirmy humanity within toxic characters finds its purest and most heartbreaking expression in Mikey and Nicky.

Like all her films, “Mikey and Nicky” has the hard-to-capture feeling of spontaneous life, but is carefully structured.

The two leads, both phenomenal improvisers, brilliantly riff off each other as their characters’ long-festering resentments bubble up.

As Peter Falk tells it, while on the set of Mikey and Nicky, Elaine May got very close to him and, instead of telling him what to do in the next scene, viciously bit his lip before calling “Action!” The resulting scene, like the entire movie, is a cornucopia of anxieties, pulsating and quivering not unlike a freshly bit lip.

...Mikey and Nicky leans more toward drama than comedy. But, nonetheless, the film is full of exhilarating moments like this. Moments that, paradoxically, are also the darkest ones: their madness and violence always points to some obscure zone where this reckless behaviour leaves a deep imprint. As often happens in May's movies, humor aggravates rather than alleviates the mood, giving the movie a unique, extreme, bitter emotion.

May details her protagonists' ugliness along with their reckless, depraved beauty. She captures her freewheeling, pugnacious actors—their street poetry and wild antics, their grim whispers and furious cries—with a loose intensity and an engaged but critical distance. Cassavetes, his head down, his forehead like the prow of a near-wreck, and Falk, with his canny nervousness, blaze a trail of trouble that, in its emotional extremes, distills a lifetime of frustrated energy into a single night.

Mikey and Nicky certainly resembles a New Hollywood-era feature, with its time-worn earthen colors, drab lighting, and fidgety cameras. But as with the rest of Elaine May's criminally small filmography, the film's sense of humor is shockingly modern. Indeed, the viciously black, ironically delivered tone could be pegged as the root for contemporary alternative comedy.

Although the film was panned by critics at the time, May's approach yielded a nuanced portrait of the male ego and of Downtown LA that has rarely been matched. The two close-ups and a master shot approach to cinematography was effective, albeit listless, in generating a claustrophobic world—a structure largely controlled during May's lengthy editing process.

Among other things, Mikey and Nicky is the greatest Cassavetes film Cassavetes never made—although, in its grit and gangster-buddy thematics, it also suggests the period's other great non-Cassavetes Cassavetes film, Mean Streets.

the brutal force of an alternately nurtured and betrayed friendship between two small-time crooks over one long night in Philadelphia was so ferocious that it left me shaken as well as bewildered.