The word "hurlyburly" describes the thought processes of Eddie the Cokehead to a tee. As played by Sean Penn, hypersensitive Eddie is the wind-up toy that threatens to stroll right off the tabletop--he just doesn't let things go. At first his behaviour smacks of self-absorption ("My biggest distraction is me," he tells a loved one); eventually, we come to understand Eddie as an existential Sherlock Holmes, desperate to get to the bottom of, quite literally, everything. Hurlyburly is about how a place like Hollywood can eat a person like Eddie alive.

Eddie wears a pencil-thin mustache and his hair lazily gelled. He's a player high enough on the film industry food chain to afford a big, sterile Beverly Hills pad and liberal amounts of pot and cocaine. (He snorts in place of morning coffee.) He shares his home with Mickey (Kevin Spacey), a bleach-blonde smoothie who occasionally shares an office with Eddie and women with him, too.

Eddie's best friend is Phil (Chazz Palminteri), a hulky, ticking timebomb with more violent and more needy tendencies as his marriage corrodes. Phil is a stray pitbull our hero can't shake...and deep down, Eddie doesn't want to lose him, because Phil's hostility makes Eddie seem rational by comparison. (As Mickey says, "No matter how fall you fall, Eddie, Phil will be lower than you.") Meanwhile, a teenage runaway (The Piano's Anna Paquin, implausible, if fetching, as a flirtatious shit-disturber) is staying at their house, a "gift" from friend Artie (Garry Shandling), who spotted her on an elevator.

The three leads are mesmerizing: they give big, theatrical performances that are also, thanks to the advantages of the close-up, paradoxically intimate. Spacey, effectively typecast, plays apathetic Mickey with ease--the quintessential Spacey moment of self-satisfaction comes during an exchange between Eddie and Mickey towards the end of the picture: Eddie - "You have no feelings!" Mickey - "No, I just don't have your feelings." Palminteri as Phil annoys and frightens in balanced doses, as it should be.

The picture, however, belongs to Penn as an addict with a brain too big for his heart. Five and ten minute chunks of Hurlyburly pass with only Eddie's voice on the soundtrack as he delivers stupefacient monologues that invariably end in tears. Penn doesn't earn our sympathies--instead, he wins something closer to pity. Your enjoyment of the film will hinge on your tolerance for two solid hours of Sean Penn emoting obscenely.

Hurlyburly does not entirely shed its stagebound roots--no more than a handful of scenes unfold outside of Eddie and Mickey's place, and towards the end of the film one senses that director Anthony Drazan, adapting David Rabe's play, is struggling to maintain some visual interest in the central location. Hence video fits this movie like a glove: TV shows--the new theatre, complete with intermissions--generally have a limited number of sets (a sense of place is even more key to the television medium besides--the boob-tube is the window in our living room through which we want to look and see other living rooms); on the small screen, Hurlyburly's cozy confines become the stuff of sitcoms and cop dramas. The downside is that a viewer is faced with more distractions at home, and Hurlyburly demands the kind of concentration a good film gets in a dark, hushed cinema.

As Hurlyburly has very little forward momentum, being that its objective is elusive and internalized, the picture might feel to some longer than it is. The film itself is given to bouts of restlessness, as when Bonnie the stripper (Meg Ryan, in a valiant but unsuccessful turn) shows up to wreak havoc in what we'll call act two. At least on tape and disc one can stop the movie for a breather: the travails of Eddie and his cruiser friends are thoroughly exhausting.

Hurlyburly looks stupendous on DVD. New Line is the reigning king of the format, if you ask me, even if their most recent output has been slowed. Letterboxed at 1.85:1 and 16x9 enhanced, the film shines brighter than it did in moviehouses--in fact, it reveals flaws in the cinematography I had previously blamed on an AMC projectionist. (Chiefly, a few shots are borderline out-of-focus.) Skin tones, shadow detail, contrast--high marks across the board, blah blah blah. The audio is available in 5.1 and 2.0, but there is almost no discernable surround or LFE information at any point in the film, anyway, save the blaring television Eddie observes with disdain and the song over the closing credits. Dialogue is always easy to make out.

This is not a "Platinum Series" edition, but the disc does contain substantial supplements. One can choose between two audio commentaries, the first on the filmmaking process by Drazan and Rabe, the second on Hurlyburly's politics, by Rabe again, plus Penn, composer David Baerwald, and Janet Brown, a "social commentator." Penn's actorly observations belong in the first commentary, while Brown is probably there as a safety net--this is a film that doesn't treat its women kindly and needs all the support from notable females it can get. For what it's worth, Brown is a very persuasive rhetorician. All speakers were recorded separately and edited together later; I prefer track one, because it appeals to the (dominant) side of me that's an aspiring filmmaker. The disc also includes a trailer and cast and crew bios; a nice effort for a substantially overlooked movie.-Bill Chambers