Towne's coke-dealer redemption romance Tequila Sunrise (1988), starring Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer, runs more in this pop vein. By contrast, Ask the Dust, starting with Fante as its source, is a tragicomic romance that has both feet planted outside the world of movies, and fiction, too. In this movie, as we know from our family histories, the melting pot is not only an idealistic metaphor but a fact that is as hard to accommodate yourself to as any fact of life. Towne has a perhaps unique ability to make this ill-fated movie romance classically seductive while doing full justice to its authentic subject.

Towne's canniness as a writer and casual sophistication do wonders for the actors. Everything that can seem undersized about Farrell works for the role of Arturo, with whom we can empathize because of his bad behavior, which is both amusing and shocking — e.g., his spiteful gesture of pouring a complimentary beer into the cuspidor because Camilla lied when she said she'd read his story. Even Arturo's measliest qualities, the way his walk changes after he's maliciously poured a cup of bad coffee over the nickel he left on the table to pay for it, are charged with his bewildered emotionality, including the sexual drive he can't carry through on. Farrell's diminutiveness emphasizes the character as written here, and his eyes, which can seem beady with anxiety, or pleading under the circumflex brow, are just right for a man who's anxious that he won't be able to show the world what he's almost sure he has in him.

Farrell fuses his imagination with Arturo's pettiness and fearfulness, and the way they're knotted up inside with his ambition. Though this isn't made explicit in the movie, Towne and Farrell nail Fante's acuteness about the ambiguity of whether a man's ambition makes him a bigger or smaller person. In the book, Arturo soliloquizes: "War in Europe, a speech by Hitler, trouble in Poland, these were the topics of the day. What piffle! You warmongers, you old folks in the lobby of the Alta Loma Hotel, here is the news, here: this little paper with all the fancy legal writing, my book! To hell with that Hitler, this is more important than Hitler, this is about my book."

Hayek can be more relaxed than Farrell because she's better suited to her role, which is also less complex. She's luscious as hell, but Camilla's yearnings are touchingly ordinary, her self-seeking innocently transparent, and Hayek gives her a lovely, simple-hearted plaintiveness, and more gallantry than Arturo as well. She can be outright funny, when she accepts Arturo's invitation to Newport by saying, "It's your funeral!" But she's more distinctively memorable when she asks Arturo to come to bed. The weariness that cracks her voice resonates with the exasperation we've all felt with our lovers, ourselves, our absurdly complex entanglements — why can't this just be easy?