The screenplay is by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue. The film—About Last Night . . . (1986)—is based on David Mamet‘s play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. I haven’t seen the play, but I know perfectly well that this is not it. It’s not Mamet on screen except, I assume, in the first sequence when Mamet-like language really flows.

The film is involving, even so. Director Ed Zwick, who released in 2010 a mediocre comedy-drama called Love and Other Drugs, fashioned a better comedy-drama with About Last Night. It stars a beautiful Demi Moore and a handsome Rob Lowe, both just fair as actors, and co-stars Jim Belushi, quite potent.

The theme seems to be the struggle, if it is even possible, to reach the highest, the utmost, in sexual love. For an hour and fifteen minutes, the movie is satisfactory, with gusto, then it turns unconvincing (for one thing, Dan [Lowe] agrees to kiss the strange woman at a party where his girlfriend Debbie [Moore] is). Before long, though, it becomes satisfactory again, even if Miles Goodman’s sensitive music has no place here. All in all, the film’s not bad.