‘Diner’ At 40: A Substantive Portrayal Of Young Men Struggling To Adapt To Adulthood

When the executives at MGM saw an early cut of Diner in 1982, they were aghast. They had been expecting a sleazy comedy in the vein of Porky’s, the sex comedy that became a surprise hit the year before. Instead, writer-director Barry Levinson — yes, the father of Euphoria creator Sam Levinson — gave them a naturalistic, darkly funny film about a group of high school buddies in 1959 who, now in their early twenties, were watching their youthful vigor curdle into bitterness. MGM felt the film was unmarketable and made plans to shelve it, but film critic Pauline Kael attended a screening and called up MGM, promising a rave review if they would give it at least a limited release. The studio acquiesced, opening it in a single New York theater.

Diner became a word-of-mouth hit, earned an Oscar nomination for Levinson’s script, and helped launch the careers of Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, Steve Guttenberg, Paul Reiser, Ellen Barkin, Tim Daly, and Mickey Rourke, and it did so without ever earning a wide release from its studio. MGM never put it into more than 200 theaters, clinging stubbornly to their initial reaction that the film wouldn’t resonate with mainstream audiences. In fairness, nothing like it had ever been made. With a script built on observational humor and improvised dialogue, Diner was a film with the soul of a stand-up comedian, and it predicted the central role stand-up would have in American entertainment long before it really took hold.

Even though Diner itself isn’t a straight comedy, Levinson has unimpeachable bonafides in the comedy world. He wrote for Tim Conway and Carol Burnett on television, then collaborated with Mel Brooks on both Silent Movie and High Anxiety. In fact, it was Brooks who, after hearing Levinson tell stories about his long nights at the diner with high school friends, suggested he turn it into a movie. He wrote the script in three weeks, basing the main characters on people from his own upbringing, and found a cast of up-and-comers to play fictionalized versions of himself and his friends.

Out of all the cast, Paul Reiser is the key to understanding the comic roots of the film. Reiser had never acted before but was a successful stand-up (Levinson would make a habit of this, casting Kevin Pollack in Avalon, Dennis Miller in Disclosure, and Denis Leary in Wag the Dog), and he got the role after accompanying a friend to the audition and making an accidental impression on the director. In the film, Reiser plays Modell, who is sort of an outsider in the group. If they were an NBA team, he’d be the sixth man. He doesn’t have a story arc; he mostly just hangs around and riffs, and somehow, he ends up with some of the film’s most memorable scenes, like when he tries to get a bite of Steve Guttenberg’s sandwich without actually asking for it. “If you’re not going to finish it, I would eat it,” he says, as Guttenberg simmers with frustration at the passive-aggressive request, “but if you’re gonna eat it, you’re gonna eat it.”

Incidentally, that scene was the one an MGM executive cited to explain why the movie didn’t work. “Just cut it and get to the story,” he reportedly said, to which Levinson responded, “Well, that is the story.” Levinson understood that audiences would respond to seeing the same conversations they had in real life up on the screen, like the one in which the guys debate which singer—Sinatra or Mathis—made better make-out records. Levinson is of the generation that was raised on pop culture (especially television, a running theme in his work) but who had yet to see characters who spoke in the same stream of references that they did. Except for Modell, everyone in Diner has a meaningful arc about the struggle of adapting to adult life, but what made Diner feel fresh was how it focused on the moments in between. Here, the film argued, is where life really takes place. At a diner with your old friends at two in the morning, telling jokes, luxuriating in your shared nostalgia.

For a certain brand of male storyteller, Diner was a seminal moment. Judd Apatow and Nick Hornby have both cited it as an influence. You can also see its fingerprints all over television. It was only seven years later that Seinfeld opened its very first episode with an inane discussion between two high school friends in a coffee shop. There is even a scene in a subsequent episode where Elaine tries to take Jerry’s sandwich before he is finished (“I took two bites, how am I finished?”). Seinfeld and Reiser were contemporaries and close friends, and, after the success of Diner and Seinfeld, Reiser got his own observational humor-based sitcom, Mad About You. If you squint, you can see how all the comedian-led sitcoms of the ‘90s, from Everybody Loves Raymond to Ellen, partly owe their existence to Diner.

What makes Diner feel more substantive than an extended bit of stand-up comedy, however, is how nimbly it explores the gender politics of its era, with each of its men stuck on a different step of the relationship ladder. Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is unhappily married to Beth (Ellen Barkin), who he verbally abuses for putting his records back in the wrong order; Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) is preparing to give his fiancee a quiz on NFL history that she must pass before he marries her; Billy (Tim Daly) is hung up on his high school crush; Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) is too much of an alcoholic mess to have a meaningful relationship; and Boogie (Mickey Rourke) bets on women in order to make up his gambling debts. In one of the film’s most infamous scenes, he tricks a woman into touching his dick—he has already bet the guys that she would—by inserting it into the bottom of a bag of popcorn at the movies.

A shallow reading of Diner would suggest a tacit endorsement of the casual sexism of its protagonists. To be sure, there is a boys-behaving-badly levity to the film that might not be comparable to Porky’s but shares a bit of cultural space with National Lampoon’s Animal House. When Boogie pulls the popcorn trick and somehow talks his furious date back into the movie theater, the film asks us to be enamored of his charm without ever considering the emotional impact of his stunt. Under the cultural values of either 1959 or 1982, it’s not surprising that the words “sexual assault” are never uttered, but it still dates the film badly.

On the other hand, Levinson knows what he has in the character of Beth, who, as played magnificently by Ellen Barkin (she was the first person to audition, and Levinson never saw anyone else), hides none of the emotional devastation her husband has wrought. “Why do you yell at me, Shrevie?” she asks her husband in a crucial scene. “I never hear you yell at any of your friends.” As written, the character is a helpless victim of Shrevie’s insecurity and rage, but Barkin plays her confusion, not her weakness, and, perhaps for the only time in the film, we see things from the woman’s point of view. It deepens the story, showing how the sanctuary its characters have created—at the diner, but really anywhere a group of men are together—holds them back from being better partners.

If Diner has a narrative flaw, it’s that none of these characters really earn their happy endings.

If Diner has a narrative flaw, it’s that none of these characters really earn their happy endings. Shrevie just decides to start being nicer to his wife; Eddie’s wife fails her quiz, but he agrees to marry her, anyway; and Billy gets over a romantic rejection by playing piano in a strip club. The last time we see Boogie, he is riding off into the sunset on a white horse with a rich girl he barely knows. It’s so ludicrous it can only be fantasy, as if these guys had watched so much TV that they manifested a sitcom ending for themselves, a neat resolution to complicated problems. It’s possible Levinson hadn’t yet figured out how to show the growth of young men, or maybe this is how men grow up. They just decide to. They wake up one day at 22 or 32 or 42 and choose to start prioritizing the women who love them over the pop culture that never did, and hope that they can live up to their promises. Four decades later, it’s still worthwhile to watch them try.

Noah Gittell (@noahgittell) is a culture critic from Connecticut who loves alliteration. His work can be found at The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Ringer, Washington City Paper, LA Review of Books, and others.