A strange combination of gritty American realism and French New Wave, Mickey One is a rare example of a Hollywood studio (Columbia) financing a pure art film. Penn used his freedom to experiment, achieving striking visual and aural effects. Mickey One is an exemplary Penn film in its modernism, use of ambivalence, contradictory characters, and narrative complexity. Warren Beatty's mannered performance is simultaneously compelling and off-putting. He plays a high-living Detroit nightclub comic who suddenly finds himself deep in debt and possibly threatened with death by unknown and unseen mobsters. He flees to Chicago, changes his identity (to "Mickey One"), and lives in anonymous squalor. There he meets and falls in love with Jenny (Alexandra Stewart), a naive young woman from a small town. With her help, he finally overcomes his paranoia and self doubt. Chicago's squalid tenements, back alleys, and auto junkyards provide a visual correlative for Mickey's tortured mental state. Critics have seen elements of Kafka, Camus, and Dostoevsky in Mickey One's portrayal of existential angst, but Penn characterized the film as a parable of the legacy of McCarthyism: "A generation had gone quite silent."-Ed CarterPreserved with funding by Sony Pictures Entertainment