More bleak malaise from the '70s - hapless NYC schnook George Segal slings heroin, has a love affair with Karen Black, gets recruited by some cops to be a narc, confronts the cold hard truth of his lifestyle up close right before an ambiguous ending. It's not trying to be comical though some dry laughs occur. It's not trying to be melodramatic either, just a quixotic, elegiacal street odyssey.

Eternally affable George Segal kinda seems miscast for this hard-edged material but maybe they needed someone easy for the viewer to roll with for exactly that reason. I was grateful to have a pal like him to counter the bitterness. He's giving off some of the same charismatic beta masculinity as Elliott Gould at the time. Karen Black brings an enchanted, impetuous vivacity to what I found to be the most involving stretches of the film, two different romantic interludes. And hey there's Hector Elizondo and Robert DeNiro as fellow scum! Plus you can't have scum in a movie without Burt Young, scumming it up in one of his first ever appearances.

"Scarecrow", "Midnight Cowboy", "Shampoo", "Panic in Needle Park", "Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?", "Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx", dozens more - that's the family tree this one's perched in. Desolate seriocomic anti-hero meandering. Some of it is more noticeably formulaic all these years later, but as I find myself echoing over and over lately, it's a transfixing watch just for how dirty, off-the-cuff and lived-in it looks, with the low-budget location shooting and attempt to capture a sense of spontaneous realism instead of Hollywood formality. These movies become more precious as digitally-reliant productions in the 2020s become more and more isolated away from any practical means. We used to be a country: hipster anti-establishment culture edition.