This was the situation that fueled Philip Roth's great comic outburst of a novel Portnoy's Complaint: Portnoy feels that being trapped as the son in a Jewish mother joke in one stroke emasculates him and prevents this mutilation from having any tragic force. Portnoy feels diminished by the very nice-boy image that made Jews assimilable into the larger society, and his anguish is inescapably comic--even he presents it that way.

Lin seems to be struggling with a similar diminishment of the Asian-American male in the pop imagination. Better Luck Tomorrow is not as original as Portnoy's Complaint. Except for those aspects specific to the model minority blessing/burden, almost every episode and character type has been done elsewhere with other ethnic groups. (In addition, Ben's action at the climax exceeds what we've seen building up in him.) Lin does avoid the liberal trap of making the boys unbelievably virtuous victims, avoids, in fact, all melodrama. In the Asia Source interview he says, "I don't want people to think of them strictly in terms of good or bad. These characters are just kids who have made bad decisions." What's interesting is that in the gap between the fresh details of the story and the shopworn incidents, you sense something that Lin hasn't been able to resolve. I felt as if Lin were not showing the criminal path these boys go down with a liberal's dismay, but fantasizing about going down it.

He's not a flagrant fantasist, which may be why the movie hasn't got the attention it deserves. The movie falls between the I-know-I'm-a-sinner flamboyance of Mean Streets, which is so much bigger an imaginative experience than its sociological grounding, and the responsible probing that Lin claims in interviews was his goal. Lin may be caught in the trap for Asian-American men that he wanted to dramatize--a fear of asserting his identity without regard to the implications. He steers clear of the truly vicious, post-Malcolm X attitude that oppression justifies any response, but neither does he seem to have full access as an artist to what's driving him. The good news from an aesthetic point-of-view is that it isn't readily articulable themes that drive Lin, but expression. The bad news is that the expression is obstructed.

The best scene in Better Luck Tomorrow shows our four young men just after a party where they overreacted to ethnic slurs with brutal violence. They're riding in their car next to a carful of Chicanos, young men with a well-known culture of machismo, who are openly carrying guns. Nothing happens, and we can't hear what the Chicanos are saying in their car, and we're not even sure to what extent the Asian guys, their heads swirling from the incident at the party, are aware of the other car or what they think about the Chicanos. Lin masterfully lets the moment float--masterfully because it's floating in his brain fluids. In this one scene the movie isn't half inside his head, it's all the way in there, and the audience, too. I like Lin for being able to fantasize without losing sight of who he is, but it gives most of the movie an in-and-out quality--equal parts novel and romance--that muffles the experience.