Cassavetes portrays disillusioned writer Robert Harmon, and Gena Rowlands, his sister Sarah in this film about the blows and buttresses of family. Based on a play by Cassavetes’s close friend Ted Allan, the film works the brother-sister relationship as one Janus-faced character: Robert, who runs away from any children he may have fathered in order to continue being the child himself, and Sarah, perpetually maternal and insistently happy, who believes that everyone needs something—anything—to love. For the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “The movie is a mighty, intimate, kaleidoscopically subjective, bravely self-searching summation of a career, an era, and a life.”