The Great Buck Howard

The Great Buck Howard allows John Malkovich to carry the film as a celebrity mentalist while the other leads, Colin Hanks and to a lesser extent Emily Blunt, just get by on their good looks. Maybe Colin gets by on nepotism since Tom Hanks produced and makes a brief appearance.
Hanks the younger plays Troy a dissatisfied law student who drop out of school to become Buck Howard's road manager. In the words of the famous spear holder in Shakespeare plays who never had a speaking role: "What, quit show business?" Buck Howard, a character loosely based on the Amazing Kreskin and with a touch of Uri Geller, represents the low rung on the ladder of stardom. Howard likes to extoll his past glory when he appeared over 60 times on the Tonight Show. Howard makes a point to indicate that he belongs to the Johnny Carson era, and that Jay Leno is the great Satan. Later in a more confidential mode Howard confesses that he's bothered about not being invited back during Carson's last decade.
Yet Howard does have one audience trick that never fails, he promises to give up his nightly fee if the audience can successfully hide the money. Time after time Howard nails the exact spot where the dough's been hidden. This was a signature trick of Kreskin. It's here too that the film recalls Geller as that Israeli mentalist went on Carson's Tonight Show in the 1970s and tried to bend a spoon with his mind only to fail.
Other than Malkovich's wild mood-swinging performance the rest of the movie offers no surprises. Hank's Troy wants to be a writer but he comes off as more introverted than extro. Even when he hooks up with publicist Blunt in a Cincinnati stopover the sparks only float platonically. It's in Cincinnati that Howard intends to re-invent his persona with a new trick. A public relations snafu ensures that Howard both misses and achieves his goal.
Director/writer Sean McGinly keeps the proceedings moving along with plenty of cameos of similar forgotten one-timers (One time you'd heard of them.) like Jack Carter or Michael Winslow, and a healthy dose of entertainment television style reportage of Howard's career. The Great Buck Howard won't magically become a comic hit but its insistence on being a realistic human comedy, and not a gross body fluid dominated yuckfest, ensures that its laughs are earned.