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A film about the life of the American television actor Bob Crane. Crane was the lead of a popular series in the 1960s. He had a family, was active in his church and lived an orderly life. Then he meets a video equipment salesman named John Carpenter. The subject is that relationship and the part technology plays inside it. Home video recording was just spreading in those years, and the two used it to record what they did with women. In time the habit ended Crane's career and his family. Crane was found murdered in a hotel room in 1978. The killing was never conclusively solved; Carpenter was tried and acquitted. Paul Schrader builds the film in two halves: at the start the image is bright, the colours clean and the camera fixed. As it goes on the image degrades, the camera goes handheld and the colour fades. The form follows the character's collapse. Greg Kinnear plays Crane and Willem Dafoe plays Carpenter. A tight example for anyone who likes dark biography and Schrader's films about obsession. Before you watch, know this: it takes sexuality and addiction as direct subjects and shows its character no tenderness anywhere.