DiCillo: Delirious (2006)

For the last twenty years, Tom DiCillo has set out to reimagine Cassavetes' New York, drawing on a regular pool of friends and actors to craft a series of transient, low-budget portraits of the city. Delirious is perhaps his most furtive, intimate effort yet, tracing out the connections between a scrambling paparazzo (Steve Buscemi), a homeless model (Michael Pitt) and an insecure teen idol (Alison Lohmann). All three are entranced by the fragile romance of faces glimpsed and remembered in transit, having spent most of their lives being given a ten-foot berth – and it’s at that radius that DiCillo positions his film, renewing something like the giddy, aspirational thresholds of the great New York gangster films and backstage melodramas in the process. At times, it resembles the peculiar preciousness of Sofia Coppola, her visions of the homelessness of celebrity, and the momentary celebrity of the homeless, but there are ultimately too many gritty, grungy moments to sustain that kind of phantasmagoria. Instead, it feels like DiCillo’s sitting on the threshold between cinematic wealth and straight-to-video austerity, oscillating quite vertiginously between flamboyance and functionality, widescreen and small screen spectacle. At times, it’s a bit like looking into a cinematic release from a straight-to-video release, or into a straight-to-video release from a cinematic release, anchored by extravagant disestablishing shots, location shots that feel shot without permission, or at least linger just a little longer than they're permitted. By this point in his career, Buscemi's charisma might seem well and truly exhausted, but DiCillo’s approach rediscovers him as one of New York's most incidentally, casually glimpsed actors: watching him is a bit like the cinephilic epiphany, the burst of raw charisma, you'd get from just seeing him on the street, or sitting on the subway. And it's that incidental quality - Buscemi playing a glimpse of himself - that gives the film its grace and charm, as well as turning New York into a micro-city, a city in a minor key, unrecognisable to anyone but the most transient local.