First things first: It’s great to see Steve Buscemi in a lead role again. He’s done a few nice comedy bits of late and his supporting turn in “The Messenger” was excellent, but in “Saint John of Las Vegas,” he gets to stretch out and inhabit a big role.
The question is whether the movie is worthy of him. A curious little indie comedy-drama with a basis in Dante’s “Inferno,” “Saint John of Las Vegas” casts Buscemi in a characteristic part, as an anxious two-time loser who gets himself into a bad situation.
Having sworn off his gambling jones (except that he still buys scratch tickets by the yard), John Aligheri is working a cubicle job in an Albuquerque, N.M., insurance company. His sleazy boss (Peter Dinklage) assigns him a job as sidekick to an experienced fraud investigator (Romany Malco, from “The 40-year-Old Virgin”).
This might be a step up the corporate ladder and possibly a way to impress John’s co-worker (comedian Sarah Silverman), whose mania for smiley faces is matched by her hunger for a boyfriend.
The problem: The job is in Las Vegas, which is not a lucky spot for John. The lure of the blackjack table is overwhelming, as proved by a funny sequence in which he manages to lose his entire stake in the course of about 30 seconds.
Although quite promising as a character study of a gambling addict tempted by his worst impulses, “Saint John” gets a little derailed by the details of the fraud investigation. These include a stop at a male nudist retreat (run by Tim Blake Nelson), which might have a connection to Dante but is a complete non sequitur in this context.
Writer-director Hue Rhodes is on to something overall, although the movie doesn’t really fulfill that promise. At the very least, he has a sense about funny people who can root their comedy in characters — and that includes Silverman, whose fame is based on her outrageousness but who has the ability to tuck herself quietly into a role.
And then there’s Buscemi. Looking even more haggard and long-suffering than usual, if that’s possible, he gives John the reality of a guy who’s just barely holding on to the last shreds of a misspent life. And making it funny.
His best scenes are in convenience stores, where John really, really tries to avoid the siren call of the Lotto tickets. At those moments, Buscemi has a dead-on grasp of a certain kind of modern-day man — the guy who just can’t resist his own worst instincts.
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