Willis plays suburban auto honcho Dwayne Hoover, who thinks he's losing his mind, and Nick Nolte is his closet-transvestite assistant manager. As the dilapidated sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, Albert Finney looks like he's trying to win the homeless-mumbler sweepstakes.
What thrived in the book was Vonnegut's portrait of post-counterculture America turned into an ironic landscape of happy-face consumerism. Rudolph, in an act of insane folly, seems to think that what matters is the story. The result could almost be his version of a Robert Altman disaster -- a movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.
