The Lonely Guy (1984)

Watched 3/24/24 (the internet)

“What if Swingers but everyone is a more-exaggerated Mikey?”

Anyone who asked that question would likely be presented with a VHS copy of The Lonely Guy, a strange tale of your average joe whose hot ballerina girlfriend starts bedding the whole town, kicking Steve Martin’s character out in the process—and that’s the entire premise. Basically he is lonely for the next hour and a half and misguidedly roams around New York with Charles Grodin in a collection of lonely guy vignettes.

The sections of this range from absurd to more absurd, clearly establishing even from the prologue that it’s all built as purely a gag machine for deadpan hijinks and ‘80s one-liners.

You’re probably thinking wow, this sounds awful and depressing. And you’re kind of right. Multiple characters contemplate death and even that comes with laugh-a-minute jokes that I probably shouldn’t have laughed at in today’s climate but did anyway. This was such a bizarre, unique movie that I couldn’t help but nervously chuckle even when it didn’t make full-on contact with the ball.

In Swingers, Vaughn is the cool-as-ice friend there to bring Mike back down to Earth every time he goes lonely-guy mode. Here, a heavily-balding, extremely-mild-mannered Grodin is a riot as an even more dire lonely guy and makes Martin that much more palatable as the “hero.” The one thing that really didn’t work for me was the eventual romance that Martin’s character rediscovers. The antics of it all just got weirder and weirder in a “we couldn’t think of what to do here” kind of way. That part of the script was yada-yada’d a bit too much for my taste.

But if you’re in the mood for the bastard son of Airplane! and Swingers, you have found it. You may have to find it on an illegal streaming site, but find it you shall!

6.75/10