A cult movie from a cult director, Mikey and Nicky stars the ever-cultish John Cassavetes and his old friend Peter Falk as a pair of low-life crooks having one last night together before the day of reckoning arrives. Nicky (Cassavetes) has done something to a bad guy and is now in hiding, petrified, in a hotel room. When Mikey (Falk) arrives to talk him out of his fear, Nicky is not entirely convinced that Mikey isn’t after him as well. But he allows himself to be persuaded and soon the two of them are heading out into the night, which will prove to be the last one for one of them.
Shot in 1973/4, the stories around this film are many and usually concern director Elaine May’s profligacy – three cameras running continuously, she said, to catch the best interactions of Falk and Cassavetes. May went so far over budget that she lost her “director’s cut” privilege. The film ended up being edited by the studio and bombed. As a result, May had trouble finding directing work in Hollywood and when she did get a gig, on 1987’s Ishtar, pretty much the same thing happened again – miles of film, studio fury. With the same result – a flop.
Indulgent, then, if not entirely self-indulgent, Mikey and Nicky is all about the performances. And to an extent May is right. She catches Cassavetes and Falk at their best as Mikey and Nicky wander from one place to another. Some of it is shot for real. There’s an early bar scene where Mikey makes a decisive phone call, that’s clearly been shot in a grimy bar full of hardened drinkers.
But the black club where Nicky is racially abusive and nearly gets into a fight, only dodging a beating because the patrons believe he’s a cop, that’s obviously staged, lots of actual actors doing actual acting. Still good though. Same for the scene on the bus, where Nicky nearly gets into a fight with a bus driver.
But whether real or not, Cassavetes and Falk interact like two guys who know each other really well, to some extent at least because they do.
As the night goes on, and the film goes on, a picture of Nicky starts to emerge. A liability, possibly a sociopath, he cares little for anyone except himself and doesn’t care too much about himself either. When his blood is up he’s dangerous, to himself and to anyone around him.
In a friendship where one party does the calling and the other does the running, there often comes a point where the dynamic shifts and the one who does the running decides he’s not going to do it any more. Mikey and Nicky is a film about that moment.
There is a Harold Pinter-style to-and-fro between the two men, who switch from the profound to the trivial in the way old friends do. May really indulges her actors, Cassavetes in particular. The patron saint of authentic independent American film-making is given a lot of rope. So much so, in fact, that the original focus of the film – a man on the run from someone out to harm him – starts to disappear, only to snap back into focus when a hired killer, played by Ned Beatty, starts to command more screen time.
The cult of Cassavetes, the cult of Elaine May and the cult of Method acting all combine here, almost grinding the film to a complete standstill before it gets back up onto its feet again for its shock finish. Scrappy, fascinating and frustrating, Mikey and Nicky is best as a film about the dynamics of friendship, though what it never really explains is what Mikey saw in Nicky in the first place.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
