Grade: B+

Verdict: A mystifying little film with the lingering tang of an excellent New Yorker essay.

Details: Starring Ian Holm and Stanley Tucci. Directed by Tucci. Rated R for strong language and nudity. 1 hour, 48 minutes.

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Review: If nothing else -- and more often than not it is quite something else -- Joe Gould's Secret is a tribute to New York's Greenwich Village at its bohemian best.

It's the early '40s, a time when the guy who owns the local breakfast hangout knows the folks who run the Village Vanguard. And everyone knows e.e. cummings. Everyone also knows Joe Gould (Ian Holm).

It takes a Greenwich Village to produce someone like Joe -- a colorful, Harvard-educated eccentric who divides his time between flophouses and the "in-people" circuit of Village parties. A man of immense verbal skill and oddball charm that's balanced by a sometimes ugly temper and an inescapable pretentiousness, Joe doesn't really live anywhere. He roams the streets cadging a buck here and there as a contribution to his "Joe Gould Fund," which is supposed to finance the publication of his magnum opus, an oral history of the world.

In other words, Joe is someone straight out of a New Yorker profile. Which is exactly what he becomes when he crosses paths with Joseph Mitchell (Stanley Tucci), an elegant, genteel journalist from North Carolina whose specialty are gem-like essays on the quirkier aspects of New York. The two Joes are soon fascinated with one another, crawling from one Village haunt to another, Gould's unabashed bombast providing a perfect counterpoint for Mitchell's watchful, contemplative nature.

Once the story is printed, however, Mitchell moves on to his next project. But Joe won't go away. As Mitchell's wife (the ever-steady Hope Davis) points out, "The story doesn't end just because the writer's finished writing it."

Magnificently played by Holm (you probably remember him from The Sweet Hereafter), Gould is part fake, part fabulist, part nuisance, part legend. He's a little like what might emerge if Peter Falk's Columbo tackled Falstaff. He shows us how Gould's colorfulness isn't necessarily harmless, how terribly close it comes to chaos.

Tucci, who also directed, sees this aspect of Gould particularly clearly and cannily contrasts scenes from Mitchell's happy, secure family life with Gould's lonely, often hardscrabble existence. He also understands how Mitchell found a fractured image of himself in Gould. (We're told that after writing a second Gould profile in 1964, Mitchell never wrote again, though he came to his office for the next 32 years.) There was something about this great pretender, this street crazy with style that struck a nerve in Mitchell's gentlemanly core, something that, tragically, ultimately paralyzed him.

Steve Martin and Susan Sarandon lend their star-power to smaller roles; he's a publisher willing to take on Gould's book (if indeed there is a book) while she's a supportive artist. But the movie's fulcrum remains the delicate dance between the two Joes, who, mind you, actually existed. Joe Gould's Secret is, in many ways, a New Yorker sketch of a movie. Tucci and his marvelous cast show us these two men, show how they interacted, how they parted and then just let it go at that, leaving us to draw our own conclusions about what we've experienced.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service