Entertainment
In his Broadway debut, Robert Downey Jr. plays a writer who succumbs to AI in 'McNeal'
A friend texted soon after I arrived in New York to see “McNeal,” the new play by Ayad Akhtar at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont starring Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut. The message was prompted by the recently published bombshell in the New Yorker about David Adjmi’s Tony-winning play “Stereophonic.”
Bear with me for a second — there’s a connection.
My friend, an L.A.-based screenwriter, is a superfan of “Stereophonic” and was upset when he read that the play seems to recycle a number of details found in “Making Rumours,” a memoir by sound engineer Ken Caillat, who worked on several Fleetwood Mac albums. The playwright has downplayed any direct link between the legendary rock group and his play, which dramatizes the tense recording sessions of a 1970s band uncannily like Fleetwood Mac perfecting a magnum opus strikingly similar to “Rumours.” No one has taken the denials seriously. The parallels are glaringly obvious. But the New Yorker article, echoing earlier reporting, raises more complicated questions.
“Seems as if David Adjmi is a liar and plagiarist,” my friend wrote, more in sorrow than in anger. “You could say the same about Shakespeare,” I tendentiously texted back from Penn Station. The lawyers will fight it out, I added, but I “don’t think this takes away from what was [artistically] accomplished.”
About two hours later, a version of this same debate was taking place in “McNeal,” a play about an old literary lion seemingly on the brink of being canceled who falls under the spell of AI. A modern-day Faust story, Akhtar’s drama turns Faust into a prize-winning author who, after succumbing to the temptation of ChatGPT, doesn’t so much mourn the loss of his soul as wage a literary defense of his new dark arts.
A ferociously ambitious, politically incorrect writer who has been drinking himself to death after his wife’s suicide, Jacob McNeal (Downey) wants nothing more than to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. But when his dream finally comes true, he’s rattled by the heightened scrutiny that comes with the international spotlight.
McNeal has a closet crammed with skeletons. He’s friends with a group of high-profile men who have been me-too-ed and fears he might be next. His mentally ill wife took her life after discovering that he was having an affair. Akhtar sets up multiple paths for McNeal’s downfall. But the play is more concerned with abstract questions about art and originality than with the fate of one morally shady writer.
How indebted can a novelist be to the work of other people? Where is the line between creativity and plagiarism? (Were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides guilty of ripping off Homer?) If a writer gets an assist from a machine, can he legitimately claim authorship?
McNeal doesn’t subscribe to the Romantic view of the artist as solitary genius. His thinking is more aligned with that of literary scholar Harold Bloom, who contended that poems beget other poems, in a network of influence that owes as much to Darwin’s theory of evolution as to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex.
In his address to the Swedish Academy, McNeal argues for a more complex understanding of artistic originality by citing the example of “King Lear.” Shakespeare, McNeal posits, did something more radical than adapt “King Leir,” an anonymous Elizabethan play that he may have acted in. He rewrote the rules of tragedy, and in the process gave a glimpse of humanity’s moral and existential predicament that has yet to be matched.
“Put that original version of Leir into any of these fancy language models and run it through a hundred thousand times — you’ll never come close to reproducing the word order the Sweet Swan of Avon came up with,” McNeal asserts, as much in defense of his own borrowings as of Shakespeare’s.
Ruthie Ann Miles and Robert Downey Jr. in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “McNeal.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
Akhtar, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Disgraced,” is continuing an argument he found himself embroiled in after publishing his brilliant 2020 novel “Homeland Elegies.” That book blends fact and fiction to tell the story of how America became Donald Trump-ified.
In interviews, Akhtar was routinely asked to explain his rationale for not simply writing a memoir when so much of his family’s history is in the book. Why call it a novel and raise ethical questions about the uses of autobiography? His answer was consistently the same: He was in search of a deeper truth. Conceiving the book as a novel allowed him to transcend the literal record of his life. For a creative artist, sources matter less than how they’re redeployed.
Akhtar reanimates this dialectical discussion of artistic freedom in the fraught context of AI. The problem is that the play is overwhelmed with ideas, themes and talking points. “McNeal” is swirling with things to say about literature — how it’s created, where it gets its value and why its truth can be so dangerous — but it’s as if ChatGPT had been asked to spit out the pros and cons of advanced technology on the practice of literature. The human story gets lost in the shuffle.
In scenes with his worried doctor (an underutilized Ruthie Ann Miles) and enabling agent (a lively Andrea Martin), McNeal reveals himself to be a charming literary creep. A moral dinosaur, he admits to Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare), a New York Times arts writer doing a magazine profile on him, that he actually envies men like Harvey Weinstein for “getting what they wanted.” She’s impressed by his reckless candor but suspects his flamboyant “transparency” is a way of throwing her off the scent of a bigger scandal.
Downey’s McNeal has the chiseled masculine swagger of such writers as Richard Ford and Paul Auster. Physically, he’s Hollywood’s ideal of the successful novelist — lean of build, coiffed like a tidied-up aging rock star and dressed with a studied casualness that would cost a small fortune to replicate.
Andrea Martin in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “McNeal.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
A film actor unaccustomed to having to articulate to the back row, Downey relies on the excessive amplification of Bartlett Sher’s production. But his characterization is properly scaled for the stage. McNeal’s ambivalence is boldly handled: Unbridled egotism is punctured with regret. Downey, who plunged into tech’s moral gray zones in his “Iron Man” outings, makes it possible for an audience to both deplore McNeal and delight in the abrasive pleasure of his company. What his impressively embodied portrayal can’t overcome is the play’s lifeless set of relationships.
McNeal is continually refining the prompts he feeds his new best friend, ChatGPT, to improve the literary quality of his manuscript drafts. He asks the program to upload his collected works along with other material, including “King Lear,” “Oedipus Rex,” a smattering of Ibsen, psychiatric papers and the journals of his late wife. It’s this last item that gets him in trouble with his son, Harlan (Rafi Gavron), who has detected in his father’s latest novel a short story that his mother wrote, her one and only literary legacy.
The father-son standoff, in which Harlan threatens to expose McNeal’s literary crime to the New York Times in revenge for the way he treated his mother, is strangely unaffecting. Akhtar keeps tossing out red herrings. I began to imagine the prompt the playwright might have issued to the blinking cursor of his own computer while starting “McNeal”: “Write a Jon Robin Baitz play in the pugilistic intellectual style of Ayad Akhtar, and make it as unwieldy as possible within a 90-minute running time.”
The artificiality of the protagonist’s interactions made me wonder if the whole play might be an AI dream. The scenes all have something in them that feels slightly off, whether it’s dialogue that’s a little too on the nose or behavior that seems hollow. Are these characters, I asked myself midway through the play, or ideas of characters? Is there a core to the story or just an endless supply of plot permutations?
The production design, swooshing across Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton’s set, creates a background blizzard of technological flashes and blips. Audiences are drawn into the inner workings of the protagonist’s iPhone through Barton’s projections. A deepfake of Downey’s McNeal blends the image of his wife with historical figures from his literary output, including Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.
Akhtar clearly wants us to struggle to distinguish between reality and its AI-generated simulacrum. The question of perception, how we filter the world around us, has been a recurring theme in his playwriting. But it’s hard to sustain interest when a drama hasn’t given us sufficient reason to care about the characters. McNeal’s belated reckoning with Francine Blake (Melora Hardin), his former mistress whom he treated almost as badly as his wife, is no more meaningful to us than his reflex flirtations with Dipti (Saisha Talwar), his agent’s attractive 20-something assistant.
The plot, hinging on whether McNeal will face the consequences of his actions, is enlivened by Downey’s antihero bravado. But the play falls victim to AI‘s chief limitation — its emotional deadness.
Movie Reviews
Bandar Movie Review: Bobby Deol roars in Anurag Kashyap’s unsettling legal thriller that refuses to spoon-feed
Name: Bandar
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Bobby Deol, Sanya Malhotra, Sapna Pabbi, Saba Azad, Jitendra Joshi, Raj B Shetty
Writer: Sudip Sharma, Abhishek Banerjee
Rating: 3.5/5
Plot:
Bandar follows Sameer Mehra’s character, essayed by Bobby Deol, a fading star who is desperately clinging to his past glory. Just as he attempts to rebuild his life and finds solace in a new relationship, his world comes crashing down. A former girlfriend files a heinous allegation against him, dragging him into a vicious, high-profile legal battle. Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, the film moves away from standard Bollywood courtroom setups. Instead, it dives straight into the murky waters of social media trials, public perception, and a sluggish judicial system where the truth gets buried under layers of gray.
What works:
Known for his chaotic energy, Anurag Kashyap takes a remarkably mature and controlled approach here. He avoids sensationalizing a highly sensitive topic, choosing instead to focus on the psychological claustrophobia of the protagonist. The prison sequences are exceptionally well-shot. They create a suffocating, raw atmosphere that makes you feel the weight of the character’s confinement. The script successfully avoids preachy, black-and-white monologues. It bravely forces the audience to confront their own biases regarding modern-day public trials and the digital judge-and-jury culture.
What doesn’t:
Clocking in at nearly two hours and twenty minutes, Bandar feels heavily weighed down in the second half. The narrative stretches thin, and a few subplots demand too much patience, making you wish for a tighter edit. The film stubbornly refuses to take a definitive moral stance or offer a neat resolution. While film enthusiasts might appreciate the complexity, mainstream viewers looking for a clear-cut ending or emotional payoff might walk away feeling detached and frustrated.
Performances:
- Bobby Deol is the beating heart of this film. Stripping away the massive macho swagger and menacing villainy of his recent hits, he delivers a deeply vulnerable, understated performance. He plays Samar with a mix of arrogance, confusion, and raw helplessness, proving his immense range.
- Sanya Malhotra anchors her screen time with her trademark reliability, turning in a grounded and impactful performance.
- Saba Azad and Sapna Pabbi excel in their respective roles, bringing genuine nuance to characters that could have easily been sidelined.
- Jitendra Joshi is an absolute scene-stealer, commanding your attention every single time he steps into the frame.
- Indrajith Sukumaran and Raj B Shetty are absolute show stealers with their raw acting.
Final Verdict:
Bandar is an unsettling, morally complex thriller that refuses to spoon-feed its audience. It isn’t a comfortable watch, nor does it try to be. While the sluggish pacing in the second half prevents it from being an absolute masterpiece, it is worth a watch for Bobby Deol’s spectacular acting reinvention and Anurag Kashyap’s gritty, thought-provoking storytelling.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of Pinkvilla. No statement in this article is intended to defame, harm, or malign any individual or entity.
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Kathy Hilton will no longer be the grand marshal of West Hollywood’s pride parade.
The city and WeHo Pride on Wednesday released a joint statement, announcing that “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star would no longer serve as the Grand Marshal Icon for the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade. The event is scheduled for Sunday.
“After thoughtful discussions, the City of West Hollywood, the WeHo Pride production team, and Kathy Hilton have determined that the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade will not designate a Grand Marshal Icon honoree,” read the statement.
The decision comes less than a week after Hilton was announced. That May 28 announcement was met with swift backlash from the LGBTQ+ community and allies, who called out Hilton’s ties to President Trump and alleged MAGA-leaning politics. Critics also cited accusations that the socialite had used a homophobic slur while on a trip with other cast members of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” an action she has previously denied.
In their joint statement, West Hollywood and the WeHo Pride team expressed their appreciation for “the respectful and sincere dialogue” around both the event and the “role and significance” of Pride honorees.
“The City of West Hollywood has always believed that Pride belongs to the community,” the joint statement said. “Since its earliest days, Pride has served as both a celebration and a platform for activism, visibility, resilience, and the ongoing pursuit of equality, dignity, and justice for LGBTQ+ people. … These conversations reflect the passion people have for WeHo Pride and underscore the importance of ensuring that WeHo Pride continues to honor the history, values, and diverse voices of the LGBTQ+ community.”
In a statement, Hilton expressed gratitude for being considered for grand marshal and reaffirmed her commitment to the LGBTQ+ community and causes.
“My reason for wanting to be involved in this year’s WeHo Pride weekend was simple: to celebrate, support, and share in the joy of a community that means a great deal to so many people,” Hilton said. “Pride is, and always will be, about celebrating and uplifting LGBTQ+ voices, experiences, and achievements. … My support for the community and WeHo Pride is unwavering.”
She also mentioned several queer advocacy organizations and events she has supported over the years, including GLAAD, the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Dr. Mathilde Krim, God’s Love We Deliver and Project Angel Food.
The latest Pride-related dust-up follows the abrupt cancellation of the Long Beach Pride Festival in May. The city’s Pride Parade took place as planned.
Both snafus have occurred as conservative politicians and advocates continue to attack LGBTQ+ rights and visibility nationwide. Some Republican governors have even pushed for conservative alternatives to Pride month festivities. A recent Gallup poll has found that after years of steady gains, support for marriage equality and same-sex relationships has slipped, particularly among Republicans.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Travolta’s “Propeller: One-Way Night Coach” is One for the Ages — All Ages
Back in the good ol’days — the ’90s — John Travolta would love to get off the topic of “Michael,” “Pulp Fiction” or “Get Shorty” in interviews with film journalists like me and regale us with how utterly besotted he had been with his first flying experience, how that drove his passion for piloting and buying planes and airfield-adjacent luxury houses.
He didn’t even seem to mind having to move house when this or that development balked at him flying his Boeing 707 out of there on the way to locations.
Travolta would tell any journalist who asked that he was writing a kid-friendly book, “Propeller: One Way Night Coach,” based on his first flights as a child in old propeller driven airliners — cheap red-eye overnight treks with too many connections for your average jet age traveller to tolerate.
I remember picking up the book when it came out later in the ’90s — at an airport gift shop — and thinking “Well, that’s as cute as I figured.”
And now, decades later and trapped in the B-movie hell of his post “Gotti” career, Travolta’s turned that cute book into the most delightful, fanciful and colorful bon bon of a movie.
“One Way Night Coach” is a child’s fantasy of flight and flying the way it used to be — with pristine, uncrowded, futuristic airports, an early ’60s era of jets and prop planes with over-uniformed stewardesses in white gloves, the days “Back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham,” as Sideshow Bob memorably sneered on “The Simpsons’.”
It’s a fictionalized account of Travolta’s childhood about an only child (at least two Travolta siblings have bit parts in this movie) of a never-made-it/never-will actress/single-mom (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) who indulges her aviation-obsessed eight-year-old with a cheap cross-country overnight flight.
Little Jeff (Clark Shotwell) will revel in almost every Idlewild to Pittsburgh to Dayton to Chicago to Kansas City to Denver and Los Angeles minute. He strolls into the cockpit to meet pilots, charms the stewardesses and checks out the sleeping bunks on the TWA Lockheed Super Constellation, loving even the delays if not the Chicken Cordon Bleu he’s offered on legs of the journey that offer a meal.
And as he’s an observant child, he comments (Travolta narrates) on his 50ish mother’s vamping and posing, her choice of cigarettes (Newports) and drinks, the solo traveling men whose attention she pursues and earns.
“I was her best audience,” adult Jeff remembers of the mother who’d read him plays as bedtime stories and delusionally hopes that this trip to Los Angeles might be her “big break” even though she’s pushing 50.
“Hollywood called,” she’d explain about their overnight cheap flight arrangements to ticket agents and crew. “They told me to take the next flight!”
At every turn, Jeff meets or sees kindness — stewardesses who indulge his many questions and bump them up to first class on the mostly-empty planes, a captain who fixes his toy model of a Constellation, a mentally ill flyer who flips out but is calmed by a flight attendant who isn’t overworked and frazzled in jet-powered tin-can jammed with Joe and Jane Sweatsocks who think nothing of traveling in their pajamas.
Normally, I cringe at pictures this reliant on voice-over narration. I recoil from stars who populate their picture with Sandler etc. offspring. But “Propeller” is unfailingly sweet and never cloying.
Sure, it’s fictionalized. But if you’ve followed Travolta’s life and career, a lot of him is in this — his raptoruous engagement with flying, an indulged child who developed a taste for fine food and creature comforts, a mother who was his guiding star as an actor.
I get why there are less adoring reviews than mine floating around “Propeller.” It’s unfailingly sweet. Mom’s man-hunting is seriously dated. This TWA tale is decorated with Gershwin’s majestic “Rhapsody in Blue” — United Airlines’ signature tune. And Travolta’s been around long enough for recent generations to come up and not feel a connection to the “Saturday Night Fever/Get Shorty” star whose career has fallen off and life has been visited by too much tragedy.
But I’d hate to be seated next to anybody who doesn’t appreciate this adorable, pristine and nearly perfect aviation fantasy on any flight, much less an overnight one.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Clark Shotwell, Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Ellen Travolta, Ella Beau Travolta, Olga Hoffmann and John Travolta.
Credits: Scripted and directed by John Travolta, based on his book. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:01
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