3am eternal: "After Hours"

When the definitive Martin Scorsese biography is written, someone will surely have to make a more forceful case for the run of films the director completed between his totemic passion projects Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. In 1982's The King of Comedy, 1985's After Hours and 1986's The Color of Money, Scorsese lent heavily into the showmanship present in his filmmaking DNA ever since the poolhall scenes in his debut Mean Streets - and without that useful deviation, the pure movie highs of GoodFellas and beyond might never have been possible. Much like The King of Comedy, After Hours provides a frazzled sort of entertainment, granted: these ninety-odd minutes invite frustration and exhaustion as much as they do, say, exhilaration, and you can see why some viewers of the time (and critics since) have peered quizzically at it. It's a film that invites different readings from different angles. The set-up is pure screwball, but it yields only the flattest, most deadpan laughs. At its centre is an errant knight's quest, but it steadfastly refuses to bestow any nobility on its protagonist. (Humiliation would be more accurate.) Certain sequences suggest an expressionist rag on the pre-Craigslist New York dating scene - a romcom that gets derailed as everybody succumbs to their worst impulses. In pursuit of Rosanna Arquette at her most doe-eyed and unavailable, gauche Everyman Griffin Dunne is driven from pillar to post, in the company of assorted weirdoes, freaks and loons (Linda Fiorentino, Dick Miller, Will Patton, John Heard, Teri Garr, Catherine O'Hara, Cheech and Chong: a bizarro-world A-list) who collectively confirm the Big Apple of the mid-1980s as a veritable human zoo. Mostly, it's strange people telling themselves and one another strange stories so as to get through the one very wild night; a relic of the days before New York and American movies alike were meekly gentrified.

It is also, I think, the kind of fugue at which only an artist with first-hand experience of narcotics might have arrived. The cocaine mania is baked in, as is the dreadful comedown, which is why After Hours somehow plays fast and soporifically slow at the same time. (No film has better caught the existential terror of what it is to be awake against your will at three in the morning, and I think I still mean that as a commendation.) Also lurking: the paranoia that someone may be talking about you behind your back or lying in wait around the next corner, that this unfair world has started to conspire against you at every turn. (One possible pitch: what if Hitchcock had poked his camera into the shadows of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks?) Clad in a white suit that either nods to Cary Grant in North by North-West or offers a mocking parody of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, Dunne's Paul Hackett is far from a spotless individual: a creep and a pussyhound, he gets only tetchier as the night wears on, and may just deserve some of what befalls him. His primary redeeming feature is that he's not a burglar, rapist or killer, as some of the other characters apparently are. So if After Hours starts in the realm of male fantasy - with a cute girl in a diner admiring our hero's taste in books - it rapidly turns into a film about male insecurity, what it is to feel you don't have what it takes to last until dawn. It's a conservative film in some respects, a great advert for getting to bed at a reasonable hour. But on a scene-by-scene basis, it never feels like it: Scorsese gives even the more straightforwardly farcical interactions an edge, and you never quite know where anybody's going to end up. The surprise is that this genuine curio was a (modest) box-office hit, and oddly influential with it, its plot, mood and look factoring into several notable indie films that saw madness beneath the sedate surface of Reagan's America: most notably of all the following year's Blue Velvet, which replayed this trajectory in suburbia, but also Something Wild, which swapped in Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith for Dunne and Arquette and ran off down Florida way, and 1988's remarkable Miracle Mile, which had to nuke the entire West Coast to top the carnage Scorsese lays out here.

After Hours is now playing in selected cinemas.