Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contributes their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)
We here at Two Cents have decided to start the year off by paying tribute to one of the greatest actresses of her generation, Diane Keaton, on her birthday month. Since passing away last October at the age of 79, many have left countless tributes to the indelible mark the actress left behind through a collection of memorable roles and performances. Cinapse recently paid tribute to the recently-departed actress twice in pieces honoring her 21st century work and her directing efforts. However, Two Cents has decided to venture back and revisit classic Diane Keaton through a series of titles that helped to make the Oscar-winning actress a truly one-of-a-kind performer.
When trying to decide what title from the 70s to begin the series with, there were certainly some options. After all, Keaton made a name for herself as the leading lady of both Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen, two of the decade’s most important film figures. Yet it’s her largely unheralded, but genius turn in the dark 1977 drama Looking for Mr. Goodbar that proved the most deserving of a revisit, thanks to its chilling, unpredictable nature and a Keaton performance the likes of which the screen never saw again.
Based on the novel by Judith Rossner (itself taken from a tragic true story), Looking for Mr. Goodbar tells the story of Theresa Dunn (Keaton), a New York schoolteacher who spends her days teaching deaf children and her nights frequenting a number of bars looking for the next guy she wants to bring home with her. Among those she encounters is gigolo Tony (Richard Gere) and social worker James (William Atherton), who each intrigue and frustrate Theresa. Eventually, she finds herself getting tired of both of them and plunging further into the nighttime world she is able to lose herself in.
The same year as Keaton’s iconic turn as Annie Hall came this darker, pushing-the-boundaries crime drama that provided Keaton with her first legit dramatic leading role, and unsurprisingly, she took to the material so well, proving any doubters that she could be just as impressive a dramatic lead as she was comically.
Keaton plays Theresa Dunn, a schoolteacher who spends her nights cruising bars, looking for males with whom she can engage in progressively dangerous sexual encounters. While the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar exemplifies the pulpiness of some of the 1970s most adventurous filmmaking, it is the grounded performance by Keaton that provides the film with an element of respect. The scene which most exemplifies Keaton’s strength comes in Theresa recounting her medical history where Keaton assuredly delivers the dialogue alongside a montage of her expression and scenes of the services she experienced. It is a wonderfully dramatic moment for Keaton, who manages to excel quietly as the camera does the opposite by showing the medical harshness.
The film is as loosely written and edited as the late night journeys Theresa finds herself exploring; without Keaton’s confident physicality and knowing expression you would lose interest early on. A prime example being Keaton’s scenes opposite Richard Gere (in one of his earliest roles) where Diane must play a variety of emotions from curious to fearful. Yet what is always present in Keaton’s demeanor is the independence and allure to keep you invested as the camera almost clumsily manoeuvres through their scenes.
When it comes to Keaton’s double bill in 1977, I still prefer her definitive comedic turn in Annie Hall, as her respectable performance is matched by the feature surrounding her, unlike with Mr. Goodbar. Still, I respect the risks Keaton is taking here as each dramatic delivery is wonderful to experience in a performance that is not soon to leave my mind.
Shocking, thorny, and most definitely horny, the 1977 film Looking For Mr. Goodbar still has the power to surprise almost 50 years later.
That said, I’m not sure all those descriptors add up to a good movie.
Diane Keaton’s central performance as Theresa Dunn is robust, dimensional, and somewhat refreshingly amoral. The film is an adaptation of a 1975 novel by Judith Rossner, adapted and directed by Richard Brooks. While we get a fairly nuanced look into Theresa’s entire life, from her (melodramatic) family dynamics to her medical trauma to her day job as a dedicated teacher and right into her bedroom as she ventures into ever riskier sexual encounters and drug use, the film feels a bit like a highlight reel with long and bizarre interludes, including “fake me out” fantasy moments that turn out to be sequences that only our lead character is seeing in her head. I have to admit to losing interest in the film on and off through some of these lugubrious encounters.
But then there’s that ending, which I’m going to fully spoil here. As the final credits rolled, my jaw was on the floor having watched an impossibly young Tom Berenger as a violently closeted gay street hustler, brutally rape and murder Theresa. I don’t know how the novel ended, but the film ending in Theresa’s violent murder did feel like a bit of a judgment on her character, like as if a struggling young woman who is experimenting with sex and drugs to deal with life’s traumas almost deserves what she gets. The film depicts a world that’s clearly dangerous and outside of a socially acceptable comfort zone, and perhaps intends to reflect that it is unfair that Theresa can’t explore her sexuality without fear of violence. But what might have felt like an empowering shocker of an ending in the 1970s today feels like a bit of a “she got what she deserved” ending, or at least a highly cautionary tale. And I guess I’ve just seen too many women in cinema brutally murdered or sexually violated to find the ending illustrative instead of tragically inevitable. And those wacky scenes depicting Theresa’s fantasies also threw me off to where I wasn’t sure if this shocking murder was actually happening or whether we were once again only seeing Theresa’s imagination. This minimized the impact even as I knew fully once the credits hit that this murder was genuine.
Looking For Mr. Goodbar, a fluffy name for a dark tale, pulls zero punches, but meanders towards a shocking ending that feels sadly common and disempowering here in 2026.
Looking For Mr. Goodbar is a very specific type of transgressive cinema that really only could’ve been made in the 1970s, both in subject matter and actual release. A cautionary tale that is more about Catholic panic than it is second-wave feminism, Looking For Mr. Goodbar is about a young woman looking to live life to the fullest, and the seedy characters she meets along the way. Is it any good? Well, yes and no.
Opening on the positive; Looking For Mr. Goodbar has a stellar cast of up-and-comers who’ve gone on to be major stars. The biggest name, both at the time and in posterity, is Diane Keaton, who puts in the type of performance that is equal parts brave in its depiction of an amorous young woman, as well as in the context of her career, taking on such a controversial role after shooting to fame with The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Annie Hall, which came out the same year.
Keaton shares the screen with a bevy of other young faces on the cusp of fame. Richard Gere, as fresh-faced as they come, plays one of Keaton’s scorned lovers named Tony, who loves to sprint around the room, do glow-in-the-dark knife dances, and ingest as much cocaine as possible before having hours-long sex with Keaton. There is also William Atherton, the forever cinematic cuck, who pines after Keaton, his “nice guy” routine repulsing her. Then there is Tom Berenger, showing up in the 3rd act as a unhinged and self-hating gay man, whose meeting with Keaton is both terrifying and consequential. There is even a baby-faced LeVar Burton, showing up as the steward to one of Keaton’s young deaf students, whose entire contribution is beating the shit out of Richard Gere (which is a highly valued contribution here).
Now, on to the actual themes and plot of Looking For Mr. Goodbar; after sitting through the whole near 2 and a half hour runtime, I’ll be honest that, performances aside, I don’t think it’s a very good movie, either in its structure or message. Structurally, we follow Theresa (Diane Keaton) through her first year of “liberation”. In that year, it’s hard to say what is really happening, or where the tension is supposed to be derived from. Sure, we watch as Theresa starts to take on new boyfriends, and starts using drugs, but every development in her life is taken in stride, with no real “negative” consequence or really any sort of development occurring. She just continues existing, not really growing or receding in any sort of way. Who Theresa is at the start of 1976 is the same that she is on the fateful New Years Eve of 1976.
The only real “negatives” we see her deal with are muddled enough in their presentation that it’s tough to tell if they are real or if they exist in her “daydreams”, which pop up throughout. Namely, the sequence where her class turns on her, and the sequence where she runs through the stories of her life as an escort. The classroom fight feels absurd enough to be a daydream, while the prostitution bit feels so underwhelming in its impact that it feels more like an aside than actual story development. Same with her drug use, which is presented as an escalating issue for all of 30 seconds, before becoming something she easily throws down the drain.
The film portrays Theresa as a woman trying to live her life, and become her own person, sure, but it also makes sure to illustrate that every issue she gets herself into is her fault. The film never really sympathizes with her, beyond dealing with an overbearing father, and her loss of faith (which was a big cultural touch point in the era). The men that she interacts with are dangerous, some more than others. An overly kind reading here is that men are the blockage to women having true sexual freedom (which, true). But, in practice, we see that Theresa is getting herself involved with dangerous men by choice. The one man who, on the surface, appears to be the “good guy,” is the one she can’t stand (even though he himself is dangerous, but in an insular way). She wants the danger, she wants the excitement. This extends to her sister (an Oscar-nominated Tuesday Weld), who is shown to go through husbands like tissue paper, getting bored of them after a while each time.
This tempting fate is what leads Theresa into the climax, which leads me into my feelings on the overall theme here. I think the passage of time, as well as the central performance from Keaton, have softened a bit of the messaging here, causing newer viewers to see the overall film as a progressive, if not bleak, portrayal of a woman trying to make it in the modern world, and the evils that stop her from achieving true freedom. But, I find it impossible to view this as anything other than a deeply anti-sex film, or at least a deeply anti-feminism film, because of how the ending is presented like a set of dominos leading to a borderline “ironic” attack.
In Theresa’s final night, she is essentially forced into the end of a morality tale; she takes off with a strange man, an act we are shown that she does on a near-constant basis, to avoid one of the men she’s been with. Later on, when attempting to flee from the stranger-turned-psychopath, she is stopped by the door she makes sure to latch to avoid the other guy that she’s been with. This is the moment the film cements itself as antithetical to Theresa’s lifestyle; it is telling us that this woman, who has lived a loose lifestyle that has earned her beatings and a house full of roaches, has made her bed through her bad decisions, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
Looking For Mr. Goodbar might have been a progressive novel in its themes, but the way it has been adapted to screen is anything but. This is a film that presents Theresa as a thrill seeker, continuously wading into dangerous waters looking for a new catch and, in the end, she finds herself in a dangerous situation with no escape. Progressive for 1977 perhaps, but underwhelming in 2026.
Apart from The Godfather series or the Woody Allen movies that she did, there weren’t many gems in Diane Keaton’s filmography during the 1970s, apart from this striking, yet somewhat lost effort. Looking for Mister Goodbar remained largely unavailable for many years due to issues with the music rights, which is a shame as it remains a masterclass in 70s filmmaking and one of Keaton’s best performances, hands down. The film is essentially a coming-of-age story of a young woman searching for her true self. There’s something great in the liberation the character feels with every one of her sexual escapades, even though it comes with some self-destructive tendencies. It also provides a great juxtaposition with her daytime teacher self, which is the side to Theresa that gives her real purpose and shows her for the genuinely empathetic person that she is.
But there is a price for the liberation Theresa enjoys, a consequence for being that free and adventurous; for going against the societal grain, the threat of which is always present. It’s the risk that comes with choosing to dally in the darkness, as Theresa did back in the 70s, and which still exists today, albeit now through the various dating apps. Some more modern critics have claimed that Theresa’s actions stem from some psychological issues, namely borderline personality disorder, a theory that certainly holds some weight. But as the story of a woman determined not to become her mother or her sisters at a time when women all over the country were feeling the same way, Theresa’s actions feel incredibly rational.
Director Richard Brooks loads his film with dynamic editing, surreal touches, and striking imagery, beginning with the assortment of shots seen in the opening credits, which give a vivid depiction of the world Theresa is desperate to be a part of. There’s also some potent suspense as to who might actually be the one responsible for the character’s shocking outcome. The answer, ultimately, is as shocking and harrowing as the real-life story that inspired it. All of this naturally means that Looking for Mister Goodbar is not the easiest film, but it’s one that captures the time and the city, blemishes and all, through one woman’s experience in a frighteningly truthful and unforgettable way.
Keaton is just fearless and brilliant here, throwing herself into Theresa’s self-destruction, her passions, and her frustrations with total abandon. It’s a shame the actress never gave a performance with this level of commitment and intensity ever again. It’s also hard to believe that Keaton had this and Annie Hall released in the same year. While it’s easy to see why she won the Oscar for that film, the victory can also be considered an award for the work she does here, and an overall testament to what Keaton was capable of on the screen.
