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'Game 6' has a strong team

No writer has mined the comic potential of paranoia more than Don DeLillo, whose novels carry themselves with a stoop-shouldered, enervated dread the novelist posits as defining the modern condition. DeLillo finds anxiety hilarious.

Serenade Films 'Game 6' 3 out of 5 stars Director: Michael Hoffman Starring: Michael Keaton, Griffin Dunne, Bebe Neuwirth, Catherine O'Hara, Bobby Steggert Run time: 87 minutes Release date: March 10, 2006 Rating: R for some language and sexuality. On the web Official movie site Rate 'Game 6'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

And in the DeLillo-written "Game 6," Nicky Rogan (a quite likable Michael Keaton, who's in most every scene) has no shortage of brow-furrowers: He's written a play that's opening on Broadway this very night, and the vicious theater critic from New York magazine (Robert Downey Jr.) is expected to be there, waiting for disaster. The play's lead keeps forgetting lines because of a brain parasite that he picked up in a Third World country. A steam pipe blasts asbestos into the open air, an event that recalls not only 9/11 but DeLillo's "White Noise." Rogan's wife (Catherine O'Hara) has been seeing a "prominent" divorce lawyer. How prominent? "He has his own submarine," she tells Nicky.

On top of all that, DeLillo has cruelly set the clock to Oct. 25, 1986, meaning Rogan's grudgingly beloved Red Sox — the most reliable heartbreakers in sports to not call Wrigley Field home — are battling the Mets for the World Series. Roger Clemens is pitching, but a lifetime of miserable fanhood has taught Rogan that the Sox will never run out of ways to blow it. (Twenty years hence, fans still remember the agony of watching the ball roll between Bill Buckner's legs.)

No mere movie could be as thrilling as that game, but Keaton has a great time with DeLillo's dialogue, much of it about baseball, and in a film that also features the elegant play-by-play of Vin Scully, Keaton holds his own. It would be easy to reduce "Game 6" to a pat revenge fantasy (DeLillo has, after all, written for the stage), but his principal concern is sport as metaphor and as the mother tongue of guys.

The traffic gridlock will recall DeLillo's recent, baffling "Cosmopolis," and nothing the guy ever writes that touches on baseball can possibly top a story published as "Pafko at the Wall," which later became the front end of his weighty masterpiece, "Underworld." But "Game 6" is urbane and modestly, pleasantly weird. Just remember: It's not paranoia if they really are after you.