MOVIE REVIEW : The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Comic

Bold, sneaky, brilliant “Punchline” (citywide) works its change-ups unmercifully. I can’t remember laughing this much with tears still streaming down my face, or beginning to weep while my sides still ached from laughing. The closest to it was “Terms of Endearment,” although “Punchline” is a lot less broad and ventures onto a lot more dangerous ground.

It has to. Its subject, after all, is the desperate need of an artist to be heard. The cheesy arena that writer-director David Seltzer has picked is the acrid, hostile world of stand-up comedy.

It may be less elegant, but in terms of the loneliness and pain required to produce it, soloing before a disinterested crowd of semi-drunks is no less an art than ballet or heavyweight boxing. They’re all good for about a 7.5 on the emotional Richter scale.

As Steven Gold, Tom Hanks’ range is diabolical; it’s enough to surprise even lovers of “Big.” He plays a New York medical student who’s been moonlighting stand-up for a year and a half, just enough to let him flunk out.

But his heart has never been in medicine, it’s on the stage of a tacky, filthy comedy club called the Gas Station. And in pursuit of his goal, Steven is rapacious, his very real charm stretched thin over a core of ruthlessness.

The role makes unsparing demands. Above all, it requires that we stay a little aloof from Steven’s charm. Even when it begins to lure us, we stay aware of his real fragility--the ease with which he uses people and the abyss over which he is poised, with no net in sight.

What might be overshadowed by the lights and darks of Steven’s character is the strength of Sally Field’s performance as Lylah Krystick.

When we meet her, Lylah’s delivery of stale Polish-husband jokes is still at the flop-sweat stage. However, she’s Steven’s equal in ambition. But it’s hard to pursue comedy single-mindedly when you’re the linchpin of a loving, unremarkable New Jersey family: three daughters under 12 and John Krystick, an insurance salesman (John Goodman, frighteningly good.)

Steven and Lylah careen into one another at the Gas Station, star and acolyte, with only comedy in common. The operative stance among the Station’s regulars is cautious camaraderie, but Steven cuts through their ranks like a shark through jellyfish. (A neatly chosen crew, their standouts are Taylor Negron, Mac Robbins as the chipper veteran Billy Lane and Max Alexander as Mr. Ball, the teacher-comic.)

Emotionally, Steven is more immature than the kid Hanks plays in “Big;” what he does know is what is and is not funny, and who an audience does or does not love. They may not love him but he can rub their noses in it, bend them onto his own wavelength. Lylah, they love--even after a heavily jocular introduction by the club’s owner, Romeo (a perfect Mark Rydell): “She’s not very funny but she has a chronic yeast infection and a Polish husband.”

Lylah badgers Steven for help, and in the course of it she inadvertently discovers life’s greatest aphrodisiac: watching a man work who’s effortlessly good at what he does.

It doesn’t come at the best time in her marriage. Her husband yearns for nothing more than an unambitious wife-and-mother. Worse than unsupportive, he’s a tower of contempt. When she flings herself furiously out of the house, it’s with his cruelest words in her ears: “The woman in this house is not funny! “

As attraction flairs between Lylah and Steven, for us, it’s torment. Seltzer has drawn their worlds delicately, perfectly, we can see where each of them belongs and what holds them in place. Then he slips us the banana peel of “What if. . . .”

The director shapes the answer with the film’s most glittering and frightening sequence, Steven’s mock “Singing in the Rain” number, a profoundly tragic comic dance, lit with flashes of savagery. Sustained, flowingly inventive, it is Hanks’ finest moment.

It’s also a signal of just how far the humanistic talents of director-writer Seltzer have evolved since “Lukas,” special though that was.

It’s interesting to see some of his choices in the much more complex “Punchline” (produced, interestingly enough, by Field’s Fogwood Co. jointly with “Roxanne’s” IndieProd team, Daniel Melnick and Michael Rachmil.)

Seltzer places Steven’s comic set-pieces on stage, wherever those stages may be: at the Gas Station; at a Queens hospital entertaining patients; outside a diner.

Lylah’s funniest comic scenes are tenderly integrated into her life, which (as anyone watching from the thick of family life can testify) doesn’t make them any less gaspingly hilarious.

Kangaroo-hopping, pulling panty hose up over her good dress as she field-marshals her daughters into meeting a dinner deadline for her husband’s clients, hers is physical comedy worthy of Lucille Ball. (That scene’s climax, which cuts right at the whistle of the tea kettle, is also a nice example of editor Bruce Green’s elegant touch.)

The intricate writing and choreography of a Krystick family breakfast is as cumulatively funny as the Tracy-Hepburn breakfast scene in “Woman of the Year,” with even more players to juggle. (“Punchline’s” R rating is solely for language.)

The funny thing is that Lylah doesn’t use physical humor on stage; at the club she’s doing patter, exercising her natural lovability and her slowly unfolding confidence. Seltzer lets us see that some of the best fun may be yet to come, when she taps into this pure vein of family humor she knows so well.