Set to an improvised score by Stan Getz, Mickey One features Warren Beatty as a second-rate nightclub entertainer, heavily in debt, who attempts to escape into a new identity, but is instead haunted by it. In one of his finest performances, Beatty sings, tells bad jokes, and gives contemporary authority to a film that was, in its day, recognized by only a few as being ahead of its time--and one of the few works of surrealist cinema to escape from Hollywood. Critic Eric Sherman writes, “Mickey One is Arthur Penn's most overtly metaphysical work. In this Kafka-esque vision of a night-club comedian pursued by an unknown mob for an unknown crime, Penn further explores his fascination with the social outcast who wants back in. Anonymity, lack of identity, is--in the case of a public performer--the worst kind of exclusion. Only death--and that death from an unknown force--is more to be feared. The Beatty character is caught in the classic double-bind: he fears and thus resents that very ‘audience' which he counts upon for nourishment (both physical and psychological).... Mickey One is also notable for Penn's continued use of explicit symbolism (the glass ball, the old ‘artist') and his first use of cars as a particularly American metaphor (echoed later in The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde).”