| Plot |
Eddie
(Sean Penn) is a Hollywood casting agent who must be doing OK,
judging by the house he has up in the Hollywood Hills. His roommate
for the time being is Mickey (Kevin Spacey), who is on leave from
wife and kids and bemused by the menagerie in Eddie's living room.
Phil
(Chazz Palminteri) is a frequent visitor, an actor with a sinister
emotional underside. He turns up from time to time, and so does
Artie (Garry Shandling), who materializes with a "CARE package"--an
underage drifter (Anna Paquin) who is ready to trade sex for just
about anything.
The major presence in Eddie's life is Darlene (Robin Wright Penn),
his girlfriend, who likes him but has her eyes open and sees that
Eddie is so far gone into cocaine that she'd better start looking
around for another port in the storm. Mickey, maybe? And then
there's a stripper named Bonnie (Meg Ryan) who sometimes goes
out with Phil. Some of these gender couplings are entirely sex-based,
while others append the illusion of meaning; Eddie, for example,
is convinced he loves Darlene, although his love is expressed
less by communicating with Darlene than by monologues about her
that he delivers to his own drug-crazed brain.
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