Director reaches back to past for new film

When Barry Levinson set out to make a movie about post-high-school limbo, he drew on late nights he’d spent in a Baltimore eatery and created “Diner” (1982).

When he wanted to capture the immigrant experience, he based “Avalon” (1990) on his parents’ and grandparents’ stories of settling in Southwest Baltimore.

So it’s not surprising that when he decided to star Robin Williams as a Jon Stewart-like comedian who runs for president in “Man of the Year,” he thought back to his years as a stand-up comic in Los Angeles.

Levinson says the new film, opening today, “brought together a lot of things that have always interested me, including improvisation and the psychology of the stand-up. I wanted to take a comedian off the stage and put him in real life and see how far he could go.”

The writer-director who made Williams a superstar by unleashing his spritzing style in “Good Morning, Vietnam” harnesses his energy far more subtly this time in a more daring mix of genres and a corkscrew plot about election-day computer malfunctions.

In “Man of the Year,” when Dobbs takes off into unhinged yet on-target political riffs during a tumultuous presidential debate, it’s tempting to think Levinson simply handed Williams the topics and let him rip. That’s the effect Levinson wants.

And because Levinson has the skill to breathe spontaneity into the most carefully choreographed scenes, it’s hard to tell which lines he sweated over and which ones the actors plucked out of thin air.

The debate’s audience – as well as the movie’s audience – actually ignite when Dobbs declares that political candidates should wear advertising patches, like NASCAR drivers. And Williams delivers that sally just as Levinson wrote it in the script.

The NASCAR reference zings not just because it’s clever but also because it hits the political bull’s-eye. Levenson wanted “Man of the Year” to rise above partisan bickering. In this movie, the cause is to rid politics of two things: big money and phony personalities.

“I was reading Frank Rich’s book (‘The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina’), and it tells you that Bush purchased his place in Crawford, Texas, right before he went up for the presidency,” Levenson says.

“It isn’t even a functioning ranch; it’s more like a movie location. What’s appalling is that everything is so managed.”

In “Man of the Year,” the electorate reacts against rehearsed, homogenized politics and responds to a fresh, authentic voice.

With his freakishly original, high-velocity, free-association rap, Williams serves that concept even better than the equally quick and brilliant but more traditional Stewart (of Comedy Central) and Bill Maher (of HBO).

Levinson satirized the intersection of politics and theater in 1997’s “Wag the Dog,” the rare movie to inject a political catchphrase into the national dialogue. “Wag the dog” became the term for creating an international incident to deflect domestic scandal.

“We made ‘Wag the Dog’ during a more optimistic time; it felt right to take the audience to a dark, cynical place,” he says.

“Now we’re already in a dark, cynical place; satire can’t compete with reality. You feel if things don’t change for the better, what’s the alternative? I wanted to make something gentler and more optimistic.”

Levinson stepped back during the 2004 presidential campaign and began writing “op-ed pieces that I couldn’t get published,” including one containing Dobbs’ NASCAR riff.

Tired of editors telling him that they’d already lined up this or that pundit, Levinson thought, “Hey, I am a screenwriter.” He put his ideas into a script.

“The computer was the launching thing,” Levinson says. “A computer malfunctions, or maybe it doesn’t malfunction, or it was a glitch, or not a glitch, or everything was fine; all you know is that a strange aberration shows up, and there’s no backup system.

“Here we are in this democracy, supposedly the greatest democracy on the face of the Earth, and we don’t even know whether our vote counts or not.”

Originally, the action pivoted on a Ralph Nader-like third-party candidate.

Trying to have “more fun with the idea,” he hit on the notion of “a Jon Stewart-like political humorist.”

The finished film has two heroes: Dobbs and software analyst Eleanor Green (Laura Linney). She’s the one who detects a flaw in the voting software and figures it out.

Test audiences responded well not just to Williams, but also to Linney as a strong, honorable woman.

“Plus,” says Levinson, “she’s not some holier-than-thou. She complains about the validity of the voting, but she admits she doesn’t vote. I think that’s where a lot of Americans are.”