The novelist and critic Gilbert Adair has argued that only a great movie star can play a great movie star; the job calls for more than just a gifted actor. Thus Genevieve Page, who created the role of the faded movie star in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway and was Oscar-nominated for the film, was infinitely less convincing in the part than Lauren Bacall, a far less accomplished actress, was in Harold Pinter's West End production. I thought of this when watching Robin Williams do his best work for years in Barry Levinson's Man of the Year, playing Tom Dobbs, a celebrated comic with his own top-rated TV talk show in the style of Jon Stewart. Seemingly (and very probably) ad-libbing many of his lines, Williams is brilliant whether cracking jokes, tossing out one-liners or taking off on comic riffs. Williams is not a great actor, but he's a great stand-up comic.

The film is a cross between Capra and Frankenheimer, part populist comedy, part conspiracy thriller and pretty well worked out until its glib, sentimental and evasive ending; it is reminiscent of Warren Beatty's Bulworth and Levinson's own Wag the Dog, with a dash of Rob Reiner's The American President. In the Capra thread, Williams is encouraged by a public groundswell of disillusionment to run for President on a non-partisan, tell-the-truth ticket, and goes 'from Comedy Store to White House'. In the Frankenheimer thread, Laura Linney (the film's Jean Arthur figure) is an employee of the Silicon Valley company that gets rich marketing voting machines, who recognises that there is a flaw in the system that gets Dobbs elected. When she sets about blowing the whistle, her bosses, to protect their steeply rising stock, get first menacing and then lethal. Linney and Williams play well together, and Christopher Walken is excellent as Williams's pragmatic chain-smoking manager-producer, who acts as narrator.