“Payday is a brilliant, nasty little chrome-plated razor blade of a movie superficially about the last 36 hours in the life of a country-western singer. On a deeper level, it is a film about certain forms of American striving and desperation, a ‘road picture' that is not, for once, a sentimental odyssey, but rather a clear-eyed study of people whose lives are linked to the road, how they behave and what becomes of them. Its clarity is what makes it so extraordinary. It is a work of such dead honest realism that it is hard to know how, except as a kind of literal truth, to take it. Payday tells the story of Maury Dann (Rip Torn in what may be the performance of his career), a third-magnitude country star, piano-wire tense at the end of a long road tour in Alabama. Subsisting on whiskey and amphetamines, running afoul of everyone around him, he is a sitting duck for the disaster that triggers his destruction. It is not a tragic tale, because the tie between Maury Dann's compulsive, reckless character and his downfall is not felt to be a necessary one--he simply has a run of bad luck at a bad time. But it is a deeply believable tale. Maury Dann is the opposite of ‘legendary', a real suffering man in a warped but recognizable world.” Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times