This is a film that reaches its emotional climax among a crowd of senior citizens at a nursing home singing a rousing song about the difficulty of bowel movements.
...The Comedian, like Jackie Burke at the center, isn't nearly fresh, interesting, surprising or dynamic enough to work, despite its occasional high points.
Under Hackford's direction, what could have been a personal portraiture of success being relative to one's own sense of self-worth is surrendered to tawdry melodrama.
A curiously likable misfire, lumbering back and forth between a gritty, downbeat seventies character study and a slick, eighties-style showbiz comeback comedy.
The movie evinces no understanding of the trends it attempts to satirize (viral videos, reality television, self-absorbed millennials), nor -- and this is fatal -- does it present any evidence that De Niro's vulgar Jackie Burke is actually funny.
Hackford trots out a series of familiar, in some cases faded, faces from the past... but the effect is disheartening, like being trapped inside a mediocre Friars Club Roast.
What should have been fertile ground for a movie -- what it's like when you're a star famous for something that happened decades ago -- contains less insight on the subject in two hours than any single episode of Netflix's Bojack Horseman.
Hackford's never been much good at pacing, and the film sort of sloshes from one scene to the next, which calls greater attention to its considerable flab - it's full of full scenes and subplots that could disappear without any real damage.
A fetid, overlong drama laden with bizarre subplots and an inexplicably star-studded supporting cast, built around the dated idea that standup comedians can, indeed, be jerks.
