“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.... 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.... Maury Dann is the opposite of ‘legendary', a real suffering man in a warped but recognizable world.” Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times