Directed by Alan Rudolph • 1999 • United States
Starring Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte

A totally unhinged vision of all-American madness, Alan Rudolph’s outré adaptation of the novel by Kurt Vonnegut plays something like a crazed, live-action cartoon as it follows the exploits of Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis), a local car dealer in Midland City, Indiana, who has achieved enormous business success but whose personal life is a shambles of suicidal despair and family dysfunction. When obscure, oddball science-fiction author Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney) arrives in Midland City, the stage is set for an encounter that will alter Hoover’s life. Maligned and barely released, Rudolph’s most infamous film is ripe for reappraisal as an inventive, uncompromisingly anarchic satire of the emptiness underlying the American dream.