Critic Reviews

In a summer of clones, Harvard Man is something rare and riveting: a wild ride that relies on more than special effects.

How can one man juggle two women, possible expulsion, Mafia baseball bats and the meaning of life, while on acid? This is the kind of question only a Toback film thinks to ask, let alone answer.

Adams sparkles with quick-mindedness and verbal agility. This is a worthy and underused talent.

The first half of this freewheeling comedy-drama finds Toback at his imaginative best. The second half sinks into silliness.

Toback's films deliver a lot of bang for the buck. He's one of the few serious and original directors who can mix group sex and talk of existentialism; a fast-paced basketball sequence cut with scenes of Mafia members plotting a hit; and an in-class philosophy lecture stylishly edited with Alan's memories of a contradictory in-bed discussion.

Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.

As with most of Toback's films, there are Big Ideas being bandied about that never quite coalesce, a failing that, this time at least, mirrors his hero's own hyped-out search for meaning.

Wildly uneven yet perversely coherent ode to the lure of sexual and chemical experimentation, the precariousness of sanity and the sheer suggestible power of paranoia.

Toback has taken a distinctly '60s-ish personal experience and done his best to transplant it into the current, vastly different, cultural milieu. Harvard Man is a semi-throwback, a reminiscence without nostalgia or sentimentality.

The film suffers from clunky smart-aleck dialogue and an overabundance of jump cuts and crane shots, and despite its libertine air, Toback repeatedly cautions that acid is a fast track to insanity, especially in combination with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.