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You're Sean Penn. You've just won an Oscar for a raw, punishing, desperate performance. How do you follow it up? Well, another raw, punishing, desperate performance, obviously. So, it's the kind of pro turn Penn can pull off in his sleep by now, but he is brilliant as Sam Bicke, the hopeless-salesman-turned-hopeless-terrorist in the crosshairs of Tadpole-inker Niels Mueller's provocative helming debut.
An intense, throttled character study, The Assassination Of Richard Nixon mainlines eerie post-9/11 prescience as it tracks the slo-mo meltdown of Bicke, a hapless everyschmuck who finds the American Dream turning to crap in his hands. Failing at his job, alienated from his ex-wife (Naomi Watts) and his future ambitions brickwalled by bureaucracy, he finally hits on an idea to strike a blow for the little man. The plan? To hijack a passenger plane and plough it into the White House - - offing Tricky Dicky in the name of truth and honesty.
It's another Penn masterclass, with the irony-edged title hiding a compelling study of slowburn despair hitting the powderkeg.
