A mood piece set at the venerable New York City hotel, since 1883 a home (temporary or long term) for generations of writers, painters, musicians, scene makers and culture groupies, actor Ethan Hawke's ambitious feature-length directing debut features a large ensemble cast drifting through a series of loosely connected psychodramas. Aging macho novelist Bud (Kris Kristofferson) juggles relationships with two women (Natasha Richardson, Tuesday Weld) and pretends to write. Poet Audrey (Rosario Dawson) pines for her elusive boyfriend, Val (Mark Webber), who's given to disappearing with shady pals like Crutches (Kevin Corrigan). New arrivals Terry (Robert Sean Leonard) and Ross (Steve Zahn), musicians, are fleeing personal demons and chasing success. Shy aspiring writer Grace (Uma Thurman, Hawke's wife) works downstairs as a waitress at the hotel's chi-chi cabaret, where spoken word artist Lynny (Frank Whaley) and wizened jazz singer Skinny Bones (Jimmy Scott) perform; she flirts tentatively with painter Frank (Vincent D'Onofrio), but clings to an unsatisfying relationship with a shallow filmmaker who's gone Hollywood. Shot on digital video, much of the film has the smudgy, indistinct look of a painting, an effect that's sometimes evocative but just as often is simply muddy. And while there isn't a bad performance in the mix, acclaimed actress-turned-playwright Nicole Burdette's screenplay is a hurdle that not all the performers leap with equal alacrity. It's pretentious in a way that verges on the amateurish: Characters share their thoughts in voice-over, often in terms that wouldn't be out of place in a teenage girl's diary, while overlapping voices (ghosts of Chelsea Hotel writers past) read poetry in the affected tones of earnest drama students. Characters direct deeply meaningful discourses at unseen callers, trapped elevator passengers and the walls themselves — devices that might be effective on stage but look painfully awkward on screen. The time frame within which the story takes place is deliberately ambiguous — it could be a single night or a matter of months, even years — and the characters exist in an eternal twilight present of peeling walls and chipped furniture. While evocative, this strategy robs them of complexity and reduces them to the sum of their mundane (or, in some cases, non-existent) artistic noodling. The few minutes of footage devoted to a performance by bona fide jazz artist "Little" Jimmy Scott, an eccentric cult favorite, is more genuinely evocative than anything else in the film. --Maitland McDonagh
