I honestly have no idea how to classify this movie and you know what, let's not put it in an easy bucket. Let's just enjoy it for what it is.

Whatever it is.

Roger Ebert tried. He said that it had "an impressive content of sex and violence, but beneath that is a strange nostalgia that seems to have nothing to do with anything else. The nostalgia is for Provincetown, seen in a cold winter season with the weathered gray houses against a pink and purple sky, the gulls' cries lonely in the twilight. This place is so deeply seen that the people in the movie sometimes seem like ghosts, occupying it for a time."

Written and directed by Norman Mailer based on his novel of the same name, this feels like a David Lynch movie made by people who would make fun of David Lynch if he drank in the same bar as them, the kind of, well, tough guys who only order whiskey and whatever local beer is on tap.

As for the title, it comes up early and out of the mouth of Dougy Madden, played by real life tough guy Lawrence Tierney. It's something boxer Roger Donahue told the writer: Frank Costello, the Murder, Inc. Boss and his girlfriend met three champion boxers in the Stork Club. Costello demands that each, in turn, dance with his woman, and each nervously complies. The last, Willie Pep, who had a 229-11-1 record with 65 knockouts, who was described as "trying to fight a grass fire," simply replied, "Tough guys don't dance."

Determining the moral of that story is like trying to divine what this movie is all about.

On the surface, it's a noir about Tim Madden (Ryan O'Neal),former bartender, current ex-con and struggling writer, whose wife Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) has left him, who wakes up to a new tattoo that says Madeline, blood all over his car, a severed head where he keeps his marijuana and the new Provincetown police chief Luther Regency (Wings Hauser) showing up living with his former girlfriend named, you may have guessed it, Madeleine (Isabella Rossellini).

How did he get here? How did he lose the love of his life? Why did he answer that ad in Screw and swing with Madeleine and preacher Big Stoop (Penn Jillette) and his wife, who eventually became his wife? Why did he do that to Madeleine? Why did their argument cause a crash that cost him the child that he and Madeleine wanted? And now why would life take the only person he can depend on, his father Dougy, the guy who may be disappointed in him but who always tells it straight?

Tim's life is a mess. After Patty left Big Stoop, she married his prep school friend Wardley Meeks III (John Bedford Lloyd),then got rich off her next divorced before marrying Tim and then leaving him and then disappearing. So maybe Tim killed her. And why is Madeline writing him to let him know that Regency was having an affair with Patty? It's like a soap opera we haven't watched for decades but need to get caught up on, except with great actors who maybe aren't great actors in this, except they totally are and every frame is perect imperfection.

And just what does porn star Jessica Pond and her cucked husband Lonnie Pangborn (R. Patrick Sullivan) have to do with all this? Why are there now two heads in the marijuana hiding place? Why does Tim say, "Oh man! Oh God, oh man! Oh God, oh man! Oh God, oh man! Oh God, oh man, oh God!" which is ony topped by "Your knife is in my dog." for dramatic reading? And what are we to make of the tales of the fires on the shore of Provincetown, the blend of The Fog and Messiah of Evil that is left as an aside in the film but definitely informs the storybook happy ending?

This is a movie about, by and for cocaine; a film in which the term imbroglio is said; where everyone is so sexed up that you can almost smell the Pine-sol scent of an adult book store's neon flashing into the cold and foggy niht beckoning couples that are ready to decimate their lives for momentary and fleeting glimpses of the kind of orgasms they read about in letters to Penthouse; where women say things like, "Well, honey, I am a witch" and throw seance parties; and you wondder how can Tim ever settle down with Madeline with those bodies still floating out there and they've seen so much and done so much and the world is aways temptation because you can't slow down and leave a pretty corpse after you've lived this kind of life; I came from this place, but my hometown is a small Western Pennsylvania town that has a brick building that is closed five nights a week but on Saturday and Sunday draws swingers from around the East Coast, a place where the English teacher who told me I'd never be a writer took a little blue pill and got in the hot tub and my grandmother heard on the scanner that he had one of those erections they warn you about in the commercials and they had to cut the blood to his member to stop the pain.

I mean, this is the movie where Wings Hauser and Isabella Rossellini have a shouting match made up of the following words:

"I made you come 16 times in a night."

"Not one of them was good."

"That's because you've got no womb!"

You have to love Mailer, who made this his way, and then even read the negative commentary cards from a screening in the trailer.

I told you all this to tell you that if everything that Cannon did, if every line of coke and every wild story from Cannes and every failure was all so that this movie could be made, it was all so very much worth it.

Oh, Norman Mailer - acclaimed author, won more prizes than you can count in one minute, and occasional maker of films (a number of them basically like shoots in a weekend with friends in his living room, or so I've been told, I haven't seen the Eclipse box-set yet of his other works). In 1987 he was given carte blanche, via Cannon films and producer Francis Ford Coppola, to take his windy, warped novel that poked fun at pot-boilers and crime fiction (film noir especially) and made it into a movie. And the results are completely befuddling.

I think a lot of it comes down to plot logic. In that, this doesn't have that much. Sure, we follow along Ryan O'Neal as he is trying to figure out a mystery involving a lost woman, an old affair, and, uh, other things. It even has one of those plot-framing devices that opens the movie, where O'Neal is telling his story to father(?) Lawrence Tierney and then this just... disappears for a LONG stretch of the film, to the point where I forgot it was even a thing. There's also Isabella Rossellini (in seemingly the one performance playing it straight, or trying to),and another actor - damn if I forget his name - who is a cop that often appears wigged out (probably on coke, who knows it was the 80's).

I wish I could explain what happens in this movie and why it's so f***ed up, but it just boggles my mind! So much of it comes down to Mailer not really being able to transition his dialog, which probably worked OK on the page (and even there one wonders if it was still questionable),to the format of the screen. People just... don't talk like this! The verbiage is off the charts in this one - but there are moments where, I THINK anyway, Mailer knew he had something really warped and just went for it. The scene that I know I'll never forget and many others haven't is when Ryan O'Neal's character discovers a letter from a woman from his past, it gives him some crucial, heartbreaking information, and then he just bursts with "OH MAN, OH GOD, OH MAN" for about 15 minutes as the camera pans around him in a dizzying effect. If this was meant for comedy then it's genius on par with the Zucker brothers or Mel Brooks. If it's supposed to be in any kind of Earth reality, it's a disaster-zone.

But oh, what a watchable movie made of WTF. Part of what helps is that it is competently shot and edited, and the performers, alongside those I mentioned Penn Jillette and Frances Fisher pop up, are trying to give it their all and be true to the material. But by being true to it means showing how completely nuts it is. Maybe the most golden part of the experience is the theatrical trailer for the film itself, where Normal Mailer on camera reads the mix of reviews - the good, the bad and the 'Uh say what' - and that makes me happy alone the movie was made. I have a feeling doing a double feature of this and another 1987 Cannon films art-house release, Godard's King Lear, could be just the thing to make you go run for the hills... or break your brain laughing. It may be awful, but it's awful in a spectacular way.

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" . . . a title like that speaks to the moviegoer: neo-noir, pot-boiler, and if we're lucky, a Mickey Spillane whodunit. Yeah, there's mystery here, I guess. A terrible one. But that's not the draw here. Internet fame being what it is, you come to this for the hilarious line delivery, awful accents and over-the-top direction. Even so, it's sorely underwhelming. The movie's exceedingly dull, and it didn't take long for me to want to slap dainty Ryan O'Neal around for a few hours. The only tough guy in the whole thing is Lawrence Tierney, and he gets maybe a few minutes' screen time. The macho runs very thin here.

Bottom line, it's not worth it. Here's what you do: look this movie up on YouTube. You'll find the infamous O'Neal line ("Oh, god! Oh, man!") and just stop there. Don't think there's more gold to be mined here. There's not. This isn't "Silent Night Deadly Night 2".

Better yet, look up the trailer. It's Norman Mailer reading the comment cards from the preview audience. Obviously staged, but as an ad campaign, that is nothing short of marvelous.

3/10