Game 6

Ask any rabid Boston Red Sox fan about the sixth game of the 1986 World Series and you'll hear a sob story — complete with re-enacted sobs.

That's the night the Sox, playing the New York Mets at Shea Stadium, saw their chance to win their first world championship since 1918 slip beneath first-baseman Bill Buckner's glove. It was the error heard 'round the world, and grown men wept.

The emotion of that event informs Michael Hoffman's "Game 6," an offbeat, not-quite-successful paranoid comedy following a playwright and Red Sox fan (Michael Keaton) through a day of twin fears: that the Sox will blow the big game and that New York's most ferocious theater critic (Robert Downey Jr.) will savage his play, opening that same night on Broadway.

"This could be it," says Keaton's Nicky Rogan, staring across the East River toward Shea in the opening scene.

"This could be it" becomes the film's catch phrase. It refers to the possible end of the Red Sox drought, the possible end of Nicky's flailing marriage and the possible end of his career, thanks to an actor who can't remember his most important line: "This could be it."

All these crises will be met before this short, 82-minute movie ends. Along the way, we'll follow Nicky to a morning tryst with his mistress (Bebe Neuwirth), to lunch with a destitute, mentally damaged fellow playwright (Griffin Dunne) and interminably unfunny cab rides through gridlocked downtown streets.

There are funny bits strewn throughout "Game 6," and it's good to see Keaton in a meaty, non-showy role for a change. He has the chops when he's not mugging.

Downey does his best with an impossible role of a caricatured critic, a man so afraid of being killed for slaying a play that he wears disguises and packs a pistol to the theater, and who proves himself — in a fine note of irony — ultimately incompetent.

"Game 6" is rated R for language. Running time: 82 minutes.