Since he's spent his life rooting for the world's only existential baseball team, he knows the answer to that one: Everything.
Wearing a Mephistophelean goatee, his eyes constantly checking the exits, Keaton is in excellent form as a smart, egotistical cad whose life is about to roll between his legs. Nicky's wife (Catherine O'Hara) has hired a prominent divorce lawyer, and his teenage daughter, Laurel (Ari Graynor), has only loving contempt for him. When he's not sleeping with his producer (Bebe Neuwirth), he's flirting with any woman who crosses his path, including a willowy waitress/actress named Paisley Porter (model/actress Shalom Harlow).
Karmic comeuppance isn't just in the air, it is the air. The screenplay for ''Game 6" has been written by novelist Don DeLillo -- the first time this literary giant has stooped to the medium of film -- and it won't surprise readers of ''White Noise" or ''Cosmopolis" that Manhattan is painted as a sprawling three-ring circus on the brink of collapse. Stuck in a midtown cab (the hero takes taxis everywhere, always telling uninterested immigrant drivers about his youthful cabbie days), Nicky and a friend have to bail out when a steam pipe explodes, spewing asbestos into the atmosphere. The city is one immense vehicular snarl, and, in the script's most strained conceit, the voice of a poetically inclined traffic reporter serves as a Greek chorus.
Nicky hears that an influential theater critic named Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.) has it out for him, and we see the catastrophic effect this ''Phantom of Broadway" has had on another playwright (Griffin Dunne, quivering like jelly). We also meet Schwimmer himself -- a psychotic loner who lives in an industrial loft space with a Colt pistol on his nightstand. I don't think Frank Rich lives this way (I know I don't), but as an author's revenge on critics, it's hilarious.
