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'Delirious'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

11:39 AM EDT, August 14, 2007

Perhaps it's time for Steve Buscemi to retire his self-mocking complaint that casting directors are always scouting for a "Steve Buscemi type" but rarely for the real McCoy. The malleable ex-fireman from Valley Stream is everywhere you look this summer, most notably playing a New York paparazzo in this winningly sweet-and-tart buddy comedy from Tom DiCillo.

Buscemi goes into sputtering, hard-nut mode as Les Galantine, a celebrity photographer whose bad hair-dye job and fleabag Chinatown office/apartment denote a three-way collision of midlife crisis, social deprivation and career failure. This struggling professional stalker becomes stalkee when a young homeless man named Toby (Michael Pitt) follows him home and cajoles Les into letting him stay for the evening.

A wannabe actor with the face of a pre-Raphaelite seraphim and the charmer instincts of a puppy dog, Toby further insinuates himself as Les' unpaid assistant. As Toby helps Les bag his first decent-paying candid photo in a spell, he flirts his way into the circle of a Britney Spears-ish pop star named K'Harma Leeds (Alison Lohman).

You can chart the trajectory of this one miles in advance, but fulfilled expectations do not undercut the fractiously funny give-and-take between Toby's blue-eyed beauty and Les' sewer-mouthed beast. That Buscemi aces his salty assignment comes as no surprise. The revelation here is Pitt, whose slug-headed rock musician in "Last Days" offered little indication of the bushy-tailed comic heartbreaker who sprints through "Delirious": Is this a male Marilyn Monroe in the making?

DiCillo veers into sentimentality midway, as Les' little photographic triumph is rebuffed by his father and mother, portrayed by Tom Aldredge and Doris Belack as the bridge-and-tunnel parents from hell. But the prickly camaraderie between Buscemi and Pitt puts "Delirious" back on track, abetted by a hilarious turn by Gina Gershon as one of those casting directors with a casting couch built for two.

DELIRIOUS (unrated). Fortunes change for a hard-bitten celebrity photographer and a young homeless man who develop a prickly co-dependency. Michael Pitt and Steve Buscemi have a prickly / sweet buddy chemistry that honors Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their Billy Wilder prime. "Living in Oblivion" writer/director Tom DiCillo really delivers the goods. With Alison Lohman, Gina Gershon. 1:47 (language and mild sexuality). At Angelika Film Center and Clearview Cinemas, Manhattan.