Mikey and Nicky: Difficult Men

For the film’s titular duo, this is a night unlike any other: an endgame, a bleak reckoning. For everyone else, however, it’s just another night. That’s true even of Kinney (Ned Beatty), the man hired to kill Nicky. The same year Mikey and Nicky was barely released, Beatty devoured the screen as a verbose evangelist for big business in Network. Cinema is full of colorful hit men, but Beatty and May upend expectations by crafting a portrayal that bears no trace of the pyrotechnics of his Network performance, making his gunman as unremarkable as possible. He’s just an ordinary guy with an unusual occupation, who goes about his deadly business with a grudging sense of obligation no different, really, from that of an insurance salesman eager to make his quota.

In one of the film’s most quietly incisive moments, Kinney grouses that, after expenses, he’ll barely make any money killing Nicky. Forget morality or legalities: in the sad, sorry world of Mikey and Nicky, where everyone has a price, killing barely even makes sense from an economic perspective.

For Kinney, killing a man he knows only from a photograph is strictly business. For Mikey and Nicky, however, everything is intensely, painfully personal. The same was obviously true of May when she stubbornly birthed this masterful, darkly comic exploration of toxic masculinity through a combination of prickly genius and indefatigable force of will. This was her first wholly original script, based on a play she’d started writing decades before and inspired by real people she’d encountered during her youth. Not to mention the fact that A New Leaf had been taken from her and recut by Paramount, and she had no intention of letting that happen again.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the short-fingered vulgarians at Paramount took a hit out on Mikey and Nicky, creatively speaking. They did not understand the movie, nor could they control its strong-willed auteur, so they tried to kill it by taking it out of her hands. 

In October 1975, the studio filed a lawsuit against May, claiming ownership of the film, kicking off a series of suits and countersuits between the director and Paramount for control. At one point, the studio sued her and her husband at the time, David Rubinfine, for criminal contempt after he allegedly smuggled some of the film to a colleague to keep it out of Paramount’s hands. 

May was finally able to finish an edit of Mikey and Nicky in time for a Christmas 1976 opening, but the release was token at best. The film’s saga was far from over, however. In 1978, May, along with Falk and former Paramount executive Julian Schlossberg, bought the movie back from the studio, and they rereleased it to a more appreciative audience several years later. 

Despite her success as a screenwriter and sought-after script doctor on films like Heaven Can Wait (1978), May ended up paying a huge price personally and professionally in an industry where men who fight to realize their vision are considered inspirational while women who do the same are considered “difficult” and cited as grim cautionary tales. She was given the opportunity to direct only one more feature, 1987’s Ishtar, and even that only through the intercession of the film’s producer and star, Warren Beatty.

In many ways, Mikey and Nicky fits perfectly into the uncompromising milieu of the New Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies, with its unrelenting darkness, moral ambiguity, and focus on troubled, unlikable dwellers on the grubby fringes of American society. It is unique, however, in being a major New Hollywood film written and directed by a woman (unbelievably, May was only the third woman to direct a Hollywood film in the sound era). It’s even more unusual in that it’s the furthest thing from what Hollywood would consider a women’s movie, then or now. It’s as insightful about masculinity as Cassavetes’s own dramas about the often ugly world of men. 

Perhaps that’s why it has taken the movie so long to be appreciated and seen. A woman ventured boldly into cinematic territory long considered the exclusive domain of men. To the folks in the executive suite, it did not seem to matter that May had made a masterpiece, only that she had made a movie that would be hard to package for a mass audience, even in the heady days of the midseventies. 

May set out to use her genius and the overlapping brilliance of Cassavetes and Falk to articulate brutal, profound truths about the joy, horror, and complexities of human experience, as illuminated by the strange codes of a certain subset of insecure, violently overcompensating, crime-prone American men, and a tortured conception of friendship as a messy combination of hatred, love, and everything in between. She succeeded spectacularly, and Mikey and Nicky is an essential reminder that great, deeply personal art endures long after commercial considerations have been rightfully consigned to history.