Altman completism prompted by the realisation that he pulled a good cast. He directed and got some help from Frank Barhydt (Short Cuts (1993)) with the script.
It's early-1930s in Kansas City, where Altman was from. Jennifer Jason Leigh donned her hard-moll armour in the lead, much like she did in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) but less effectively. Her man Dermot Mulroney (mostly inert) fell afoul of Harry Belafonte's gang and an excess of verbiage resulted. For reasons incompletely revealed she then spent most of the runtime with laudanum sniffing/swilling Miranda Richardson, dragging her from one location to another, perhaps because Julianne Moore was too busy to appear here. Steve Buscemi had a very minor role as an organiser for a get-out-the-vote Democrat machine. Jane Adams (Happiness (1998)) played a very proper steward of young women in trouble.
The whole show is sliced up with footage of a jazz concert that looks like it went for days. Ultimately it and the efforts of the cast are squandered in an underbaked neo-noir that needed more oomph than its apparently real-world antecedents could supply. The project is of the same kind as other navel-gazing self-absorbed nostalgia efforts like The Fabelmans (2022).
Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: it's not Nashville (1975).
