So while anyone who has any memory of the early Seventies will feel like they're back there again with the establishment / counterculture antagonisms and
raging ego trips and spells of mellow sunlight, they will also, like the film's hero, detect another phantom vibe.
Robert Downey Jr.'s Blake Allen is enough of a
raging dynamo to find the dark humor and desperate romanticism at the heart of Mr. Toback's
ego trip of a premise, and to make Blake sympathetic too.