Mister Buddwing is now a stand-up comic

Last week's theme for the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon was Movies that Confused You. Unfortunately, I only watched Mickey One after doing that entry, or else I could have used it in the blogathon.

Warren Beatty plays Mickey, a stand-up comedian in Detroit who apparently likes to gamble and entertain the ladies when he's not up on stage. He's accrued some gambling debts, and somehow the Mob has gotten a hold of those debts and wants him to pay up now. But how much, and how the Mob got those debts is a mystery to the comic and, frankly, to the viewer as well.

So our comic decides that, since he can't pay those debts, he's going to go running off to Chicago to try to get away from the Mob. Fat lot of good that's going to do him. A lot of the better nightclubs have Mob ties, but which branch of the Mob is it? Getting in with the wrong branch could cause problems for Mickey.

With the help of a manager who looks like he should have died 20 years ago, Mickey gets gigs at some lesser clubs, and this eventually brings him to the attention of Castle (Hurd Hatfield), who manages a club called Xanadu, which has nothing to do with roller disco. The agent may be able to get Mickey a gig there, which may help Mickey at least figure out how much he owes and to whom. But Mickey worries that he's not seeing the right people.

Along the way, Mickey winds up with a girlfriend in Jenny (Alexandra Stewart). But he doesn't want to get too close to her because he doesn't want her to get hurt. And who knows, but she could be a lure to get him killed by the Mob. Or something like that.

I found Mickey One maddeningly hard to understand, and as I was watching, I couldn't help but think of another movie that's tough to decipher, Mister Buddwing. In that movie, James Garner plays a man who wakes up in a city park one day with a bad case of amnesia. I'm guessing that Warren Beatty's Mickey knows who he is, but the way everything is presented made me wonder whether a bunch of the scenes, such as Mickey in the auto junkyard, were supposed to be some sort of dream or allegory and not real. At least, that's the interpretation I gave it to try to make the movie less incomprehensible.

So I was frankly glad to get finished with Mickey One so that I could delete it from the DVR and make room for something else.