At the heart of Delirious is a pair of NYC celebrity hounds: Les (Steve Buscemi), a shimy photographer, and Toby (Michael Pitt), a street urchin with dreams of acting. In exchange for a place to crash, Toby talks Les into hiring him as an unpaid assistant (because, really, who can say no to an unassuming intern) and ends up rubbing elbows with young pop diva K’Harma (Alison Lohman). It’s a companion piece of sorts to Buscemi and writer-director Tom DiCillo’s previous collaboration Living in Oblivion — an exasperatingly funny exposé on low-budget filmmaking — albeit without Oblivion’s consistent tone of parody via realism. Delirious’s formalist schizophrenia leaves one uncertain if the film is intended to be farce or fairy tale, but Buscemi’s dynamite performance makes it worth seeing anyway. By effortlessly toeing the line between scumbag and sad-sack underdog, he and DiCillo achieve something remarkable: a critical and sympathetic depiction of a paparazzo.
Opens August 15
Opens August 15
