Then James Toback is your rainmaker, and WHEN WILL I BE LOVED your perverse, perfect storm. For everyone else, it's just further evidence of a one-time worthwhile filmmaker's creative decline that began with BLACK AND WHITE in 1999.
Toback's an odd bird: a spoiled rich kid who insinuated himself into the black counterculture back in the late 1960's while gambling himself into serious debt *and* running up a tab of sexual conquests that would make Wilt Chamberlin break out his calculator. He also allegedly took the biggest hit of LSD in recorded history (the annals of drug history being so scrupulously reliable). In other words, the motherfucker lived his ass off, and, for over twenty years, these lurid exploits were often the fuel for great screenplays (e.g. THE GAMBLER, FINGERS and BUGSY) that captured life dangling over the precipice. I adore FINGERS; it's impure male id spurted out at 24fps about a schizophrenic concert pianist/thug (Harvey Keitel) who bears a bruising resemblance to the filmmaker himself. It's got a Cassavetes-esque wildness about it, though it's absent the indie pioneer's humanism. There isn't a kind bone in FINGERS' body; it's a masterpiece of misanthropy that enrages as much as it dazzles. If you've never seen it, do so. (Working up a head of steam writing about it, I'm wishing I had a copy at the ready myself.)
Even when Toback is overbearing, which is always, he gets such nakedly honest performances out of his lead actors that the films, ostensibly personal statements for the writer/director, become dual confessionals. Most people either love or hate TWO GIRLS AND A GUY; despite Natasha Gregson Wagner's most useless performance in a career littered with them, I think it's a phenomenal high wire act by Robert Downey, Jr., who rescues Toback's worst writing impulses with one of the great virtuoso film performances of the last twenty years. Watching him as he flits about his Manhattan loft bellowing the first movement of Vivaldi's GLORIA or banging out a flamboyant rendition of "You Don't Know Me' at the piano while ineptly playing traffic cop in the two-car pileup that is his love life is to see a limitlessly talented actor redline it for ninety minutes. It's the performance people had been waiting to see Downey, Jr. give for years, and selfishly hoping he'd get around to before killing himself. (Thankfully, he's still with us, though it's been since WONDER BOYS that he brought his "A" game.)
If Toback's ear was getting a bit tinny with that film, he went stone cold tone deaf with BLACK AND WHITE, which felt like Toback trying to reassert his hipster cred within the African-American community by casting every hip-hop or sports star available. Most of the Wu-Tang Clan shows up, as does Mike Tyson, but Toback the filmmaker does not, and the film collapses into a heap of disconnected scenes that are only occasionally amusing (e.g. Robert Downey, Jr. risking his life in the name of improv by propositioning Tyson). It's the kind of disaster that would've made for a great behind-the-scenes documentary. Unfortunately, one has not emerged.
Toback followed BLACK AND WHITE up with HARVARD MAN, which was so slipshod in its execution I didn't think him capable of a more dubious achievement. And that brings us back to WHEN WILL I BE LOVED. Once again, Toback trots out his famous friends -- Damon Dash, Mike Tyson and Lori Singer -- to show us that he's -- yes, Lori Singer -- still a man about town. Meanwhile, he's investigating the balance of power in male/female relationships, and how it's predicated by material wealth. Or something. To tell you the truth, I lost interest early on when Frederick Weller got into an exposition-crammed screaming match with some bimbo on Times Square. Though there was always an element of the undisciplined about Toback, he was never this clumsy in setting up his narrative.
But I kept it on mostly for the prurient pleasure of watching Neve Campbell in the buff, not to see her get shtupped by Dominic Chianese (the only kind of fucking I want to see Uncle Junior doing is the figurative sort). As for Toback, you may still be living the wild life at sixty, but your dispatches from the edge have gone from exhilarating to pathetic. It's an act that's no longer becoming. Time to keep it to yourself, man.