Twenty-four hours after the sentence of his trial, in a borrowed house in Connecticut, Harvey wakes up at dawn sweaty and restless, but full of confidence: this is America, and in America those who are like him are not condemned. There was a time when people turned their backs on him, but those people were soon replaced by new people: and the people who owed him favors, Harvey thinks, are still going to have to pay them back. They have tried to destroy his reputation, but have not succeeded, and that same day fate tells him how to finish restoring it; the familiar face of the neighbor next to him turns out to be that of the writer Don DeLillo, and Harvey already imagines the neons: Background noise, the maladaptive novel, made into a movie at last; the perfect alliance between ambition and prestige at the service of his return. And yet, the passing of the hours soon begins to fill with disturbing, ominous signs; deepening cracks in the confidence with which Harvey had dawned …

With her usual psychological subtlety, Emma Cline tells this story from the most uncomfortable place: from the mind of a Harvey (Weinstein, of course) for whom no last names are necessary, and who is portrayed here as someone fragile and needy, who overvalues ​​his intelligence and exhibits ridiculous megalomania; a man completely detached from a reality, that of his condemnation, which is becoming more and more terrifyingly visible to him, and in which assumptions of a guilt that his own and conscious of him deny are filtered through. Avoiding the most recurrent angles of a subject many times illuminated by a single light, resorting to injections of a dull humor and taking advantage of the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the interactions between the characters with insight and without underlining, Emma Cline constructs with Harvey a piece of camera for turns penetrating, funny and disturbing, revealing his ability for a distance, that of the nouvelle, that he had not explored until now.