The Mimic

A writer is intrigued by his new neighbor, a potential sociopath, unless he also is one in this dark comedy with sharp timing.

As we are reminded multiple times in "The Mimic," one out of 25 people in the U.S. could be classified as a sociopath, at least according to the book "The Sociopath Next Door" by a Harvard psychologist. This dark comedy looks at the relationship between a writer who thinks his new neighbor may be one, but also faces the prospect that he might be a sociopath, too.

Lots of people confuse sociopaths with psychopaths, but the truth is they're harder to spot because they can be socially competent and even charming when they want to be. It's more associated with a lack of empathy, a tendency toward impulsive behavior and trying to manipulate others.

All of us are sociopaths to different degrees, if you ask me, which is a very sociopathic thing to say.

Thomas Sadoski plays The Narrator, and yes this is one of those movies where people have titles rather than names. I thought it'd bother me but it didn't. Mainly because people don't actually go around calling each other "Narrator" or whatever, they just have normal conversations where they don't happen to use names.

Anyway, he's a screenwriter living in bucolic upstate New York who's in early middle age, a widower and deep-seated cynic.

His only major social outlet seems to be dabbling in "the newspaper," which appears to just be an excuse for local old hens to get together and gossip about who's died, who's about to or who's shacking up with whom. Jessica Walter plays the Editor, as a lot of recognizable actors turn up in bit roles.

New to the group is The Kid (Jake Robinson), as Narrator calls him, though he's actually only a decade younger than him. The Kid is good-looking and seems to be smart, but Narrator notices there's just something a bit off about him -- his monotone inflection, the way he doesn't seem to ever say anything original but only mimics (now you get it) others around him.

The Kid seems intent on mimicking the Narrator more than anything else, and the rest of the movie is pretty much a series of interactions between them. Narrator is trying to puzzle out whether the Kid is a sociopath, and even goes so far as to tell him his intent.

He's also basing his next screenplay on him, so this movie -- written and directed by Thomas F. Mazziotti, just his third film in the last 30 years -- is something of a fourth wall-breaking exercise in self-awareness. At one point we even cut away to people playing the Writer and Director (Doug Plaut and M. Emmet Walsh, respectively) arguing about how well the screenplay is coming along and what they should do next.

Robinson and Sadoski mesh nicely together, and their sharp sense of comedic timing keeps these conversations fresh and funny. There's a lot of puzzled looks and subtle accusations, as things work up to something like understanding.

For awhile, the Kid's chief mystery is that he claims to be married but we never actually see his wife. The Narrator believes she may be a figment of the imagination, and sets out various ploys to suss out the truth. The Kid, for his part, seems curious rather than affronted by all this suspicion, and more or less plays along with the game.

A few other actors who show up: Gina Gershon as a woman at the bar the Kid is assigned to seduce; Tammy Blanchard as the youngest member of the newspaper staff, possibly a romantic match for Narrator; Marilu Henner as the Assistant Editor; Jessica Keenan Wynn as the local Librarian who seems more interesting than any characters in any of the books she guards; and Austin Pendleton as a Driver who tailgates the Kid, leading to a confrontation which unexpectedly leads to a pleasant conversation which leads somewhere less pleasant.

It's rather hard to know what to make of "The Mimic." It definitely has a bit of a sitcom feel, but is too zany and narratively all over the map for television. All I know is I enjoyed hanging out with these two strange men and their various associates, even if the whole lot of them is cracked in one way or another.