All About Nina: Or Rather, The Queen Of Comedy

The Queen Of Comedy: And De Niro's brutal portrayal taken to another level, laced with macabre when not pornographic shock jokes, updated and feminized for the 21st century. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is Nina, a gift of gab angry and bitter standup comic, mining her dark side and even more disturbing past for sarcastic laughs on offbeat NYC stages. And bizarrely, nobody in the audience seeming to care, or notice her existential pain while weirdly enjoying the evening.

And navigating a life strung together with one night gigs alternating with one night stands  - when not one minute impulsive sex hookups - Nina struggles along the way with barf-fueled anxiety attacks and therapy sessions resolving nothing. Until one day grabbing a chance for the relative big time and venturing off to LA, where she becomes further confused and emotionally torn by a romantic encounter with a persistent local hunk there (Common) who is into her for real.

Written and directed by Eva Vives (Raising Victor Vargas), All About Nina unravels as a dramatic minefield, in large part what it doesn't appear to be about at all. And a ferociously raw comic noir that provocatively stings. Oh, and Common may have the best line in any movie this year, and in a strange way satirically upstaging Winstead's own routine for that wild moment in the movie: "A married cop, he left his wife for you, that's great Nina - I bet he chokes black people for fun too."

Prairie Miller