For once (at last) extremes inform the middle, the down-and-out the up-and-in, Long Island blue collar barflies the rest of us so-called well-adjusted's. This demands the proper mix of compassion and dispassion, which for Buscemi, as for others similarly gifted, leads to an almost inseparable mix of comedy and pathos: up is down, down is up.<br /><br /> Buscemi plays himself, or what he probably would have been had he not found his talent in movie making, namely, a "loser" trapped in a downward spiral of unemployment, drugs, alcohol, and loneliness, familiar ingredients of endless movies, TV docudramas, talk shows, and news, all humbuggery and false preaching; so familiar, in fact, as to pose an American fixation, something we see so much of that we no longer see at all. <br /><br /> He's not afraid to let things get ugly, really ugly, down right squalid. An unemployed, unemployable car mechanic ends up by default driving an ice cream truck through the sun-drenched tree-lined streets of suburbia, a peculiarly American version of hell. Strange to say, the whole mess is uplifting and absurd; Buscemi loves his characters, warts and all; he warms us to them with a wealth of detail, emerging us in a whole crowd of people, complete with its own history and past, each member whole and completely formed, with hardly a trace of exaggeration or artifact, a false note or cliche. <br /><br />Because more is at stake--the "American dream"--this is a better movie than Buscemi's i Living in Oblivion (1995), which was about the trials and tribulations of making an independent film on a shoe-string. Because both films are centered on the social life of a bar, comparison to Barbet Schroeder's i Barfly is inviting; but the latter's hero is a diamond in the rough, while the one here is just a schmegegge.