Oliver Stone's adaptation of a stage play by (and with) Eric Bogosian. And, for all the spaciousness of the set, the restless camerawork, the misty, powdery flashbacks, it very much looks like it. Like a stage play, that is. The basic text of it, taking off from the real-life murder of the inflammatory talk-jockey Alan Berg and transforming him into the fictitious "Barry Champlain" (né Golden), and relocating him from Denver to Dallas (capital of U.S. political assassinations), is dead-center in the Budd Schulberg vein: a Face in the Crowd for modern-day radio or a What Makes Sammy Run with less psychology: more of an elementary See Barry Run. What little psychology creeps in (a caller queries the protagonist, "Do you not love yourself?" and the poignant music and pregnant pause tell us that a dearth of love is indeed at the heart of the matter) would best, and most kindly, be ignored. But Bogosian himself, repeating his caged-tiger stage role and seeming at times to be auditioning for a remake of Lenny, captures the external ambience of the man to perfection, a brick wall as both a listener and a reliable returner of volleys. Of course a little of this, as of actual radio call-in shows, goes a long way. And one begins to suspect that such a character perhaps merits exactly the allotment of time he was given in the preamble to Costa-Gavras's Betrayed. To give him any more, to give him anyway as much as he is given here, to be taken behind the scenes, for example, to witness him identifying his producer and girlfriend as his "secretary," is simply to run the risk of increasing the rolls of people who, if they wouldn't want to pull the trigger themselves, won't be sorry to see it happen. With Ellen Greene and Alec Baldwin. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd