In 1973, Sam Bicke (Penn) finds life beginning to crumble. His estranged wife (Watts) seems uninterested in getting back together. His boss (Thompson) seems to be asking him to lie at work--something that caused him to stop working for his brother (Wincott). Only his best friend (Cheadle) seems like an honest man, and now Sam's beginning to wonder about him too. If everyone in society is content to lie, maybe he needs to do something drastic to shake people up. Like kill the President.

Watching Sam lose his grip on reality is extremely frightening, especially since he's a nice guy with simple goals: He wants to be an honest man, to work and have a family. But "what good is good in times like these?" Penn captures Sam's inner soul beautifully; he really wins our sympathy, then terrifies us with his mentally unstable reactions to everything around him. And as we get to know him, the reactions of the actors around him begin to come into focus--at first everyone seems dismissive and rude, but we begin to understand that they've been through all this before. Only this time they haven't a clue where it's leading.

And neither do we. I'd never heard this story, so I had no idea how it would end--besides the fact he wouldn't actually succeed in his seriously unnerving plan! Mueller directs the film with a gentle, loping rhythm that really captures this simple man's life as well as the period. This is not a thriller; it's a drama about one man losing the ability to cope with the everyday horrors of modern society. The ghost of President Nixon intriguingly haunts the film from ubiquitous TV screens covering the Watergate hearings. Sam is simply trying to cure the cancer in the system. And the parallels with today are so striking that the film is utterly unforgettable.