"It's all about the money, Dick!" screams Samuel Bicke at a particular turning point in his unhappy life. His rage is directed, in particular, towards the visage of President Nixon on the television in the office supply store where he's a salesman; and, more generally, towards America as a whole and a system so based on capitalism that a little man down on his luck cannot regain his footing without resorting to blatant dishonesty. Samuel doesn't hate money; he just hates having to lie to get it, and at this particular point, he's decided he will sacrifice his integrity no more.

This moment comes as his rope burns to the quick, after his wife Marie has served him with divorce papers; after his older brother Julius has disowned him; after his dreams of starting his own honest business are shot down by the government. To be fair, from an objective point of view, these are not entirely unreasonable actions: Marie is practically smothered by Samuel, who shows up randomly at her house or the restaurant where she works; Julius, who owns a succesful tire company, has had to put up with his little brother's petty, ridiculous thefts one too many times; and the government can't entirely be faulted for turning down Samuel's application for the loan he needs to start his own portable tire company, for which the business plan is not much more than an illustration drawn up in red crayon -- a good idea, maybe, but not a wise investment.

On the other hand, an objective stance is completely beside the point of this film, whose purpose is to actively put us in the mindset of a protagonist who decides that he must make a stand against the country in the most extreme manner he can conceive.

That particular manner may or may not be news to you. You may have read about it in other reviews; perhaps the trailers for the film gives it away; certainly, very few people remember the actual story. In 1974, a man decided to crash a plane into the White House. His hijacking attempt never made it past the runway, and the true nature of his plans remained unknown until audio tapes he'd recorded surfaced, on which he explained his motives and personal agenda in great detail. These tapes had been mailed to Washington Reporter scribe Jack Anderson; and also to composer Leonard Bernstein, in whose music this would-be assassin found the truth and beauty that was so lacking in the rest of the country.

This man's name was Samuel Byck, and he's been entirely forgotten by the history books. One wouldn't expect a story like this to be nothing more than a footnote, but that's what it was when writer/director Niels Mueller stumbled upon it as he was working on a script about a fictional assassin. He unearthed enough material to tell Byck's story, and in doing so has created the most subjective -- and therefore reasonable, sympathetic and frightening -- look at the forces and circumstances that can lead a person to this particular strand of murder since Taxi Driver (it's an odd coincidence that Byck's name was changed to Bicke -- one letter away from Travis Bickle's surname). It's a perspective enhanced by Mueller's decision to put Penn in nearly every shot of the film -- never once dallying from his point of view -- and by the rather urgent prescience that this story has. That it's being released now, during wartime, with a President in office whom half the country sees as a boldfaced liar, may seem more well-planned than it actually is: Mueller actually wrote the script while Clinton was in office, and Sean Penn attached himself to it long before it went into production. Over the years it spent in development, they must have marveled at how the parallels between their film and the political climate grew ever narrower.

Bicke, as played by Penn, is a luckless and pathetic man who is endlessly well-meaning. He loves his family to a fault, and he's greatly concerned with the state of the country. He makes donations to the Black Panthers because he believes all people should be treated equally and honestly and sees the Panthers as the most obvious evidence that that they aren't. He works as a salesman, a job he is inherently terrible at; he can't see past the fallacy of selling something to someone who doesn't necessarily want the product, or lying to make that product more attractive, but he keeps the job with the hopes that it will provide him with enough stability to. The scenes with him and Marie (Naomi Watts, rendered nearly unreconizable with long dark hair) are masterful examples of creating impressions of entire lives with no direct exposition; everything that went wrong in their marriage is evident in the way they interact, and in the alternately hopeful and hopeless expressions of these two wonderful actors. Likewise, Bicke's relationship with his brother Julius (Michael Wincott) or his best friend Bonny (Don Cheadle) answer questions we might have had about his character without ever even acknowledging them.

He is a transparent human being; his self worth is represented in his posture, in the ugly moustache he takes so much pride in. It's an overwhelming performance from Penn -- overwhelming to a fault at times, when his tics get so extreme that he almost seems a little too unhinged a little too early on, but for the most part perfect. His character's progression is so natural that I wish the film had been in strict chronological order (it begins just before the assasination attempt, giving us a taste of what's to come); that way, we wouldn't be waiting for him to snap, nor would we realize it until the scene where his plan takes shape -- which will nonetheless sends a cold jolt of deja vu into your stomach.

The Assassination Of Richard Nixon is a bit of a misnomer of a title; Nixon's life was long, and this paltry attempt on it was quickly overshadowed by the subsequent scandal that brought down his administration. The title sounds like it is descriptive of a particular event, but after seeing the film, you realize it's suggesting an idea, and that the film itself is about why that idea might seem like a good one to a man like Samuel Bicke. In an early scene, his boss (Jack Thompson) tells him that Richard Nixon is the greatest salesman of all time; he managed to sell the country on the same promise twice, without ever once delivering. That's the problem Samuel sees with the entire country. Lying isn't considered wrong when money or power is involved. He doesn't know have the capacity to handle this fallacy in an rational way, but Penn and Mueller do an incisive job of making his irrationality perfectly clear.