It's so satisfying to see a well-written film that it's easy to forgive the stagey quality about this adaptation of David Mamet's 1982 play, an ironic elegy for a businessman attempting to free himself from his humdrum existence. It's also great to see William H Macy, always an intriguing actor, in a part that stretches him throughout.

Though director Stuart Gordon is chiefly known as a horror expert, this is not so very far from his usual beat. The life of the businessman, Edmond, takes a downward turn after he is told by a tarot reader, "You are not where you belong," and takes it as his cue to leave his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) and start out on a hopeful spree to get laid in the lower depths of LA.

Nothing goes right for him among the unfeeling hotel clerks, glazed hookers, threecard grifters and violent conmen with whom he has explosive encounters.

First he meets Joe Mantegna's bar crawler, who seems to understand his discontentment. "Niggers," he says (and he uses that word without being thrown out of the bar) have things easy because they won't accept their responsibilities. White men do, and it ruins their lives.

Armed with this racist comment, and with the address of a girly bar, he ventures into the night. But at the bar he's disgusted when the girl who offers herself for $50 makes him buy a drink for three times more. "It's too much," he complains, and the whole of his night proves far too much as well.

Finally, he gets to bed a waitress whose views are much the same as his. But he's clearly about to crack and, when he does, a nightmare begins worse than anything that's gone before.

The dialogue is either heightened realism or not realism at all. But the stylisation is marvellous as a showcase for an actor as good as Macy and true enough to the spirit of this audaciously incendiary work. It's like an eccentric tangent to Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet's greatest play.

Denise Richards, Julia Stiles and Mena Suvari back up the central performance with considerable erotic skill. The ending is a remarkable tour de force.

This is a small film with a big payback, like a series of tableaux that illustrate how a mildmannered Mr Everyman can become viciously untamed.