In his debut novel Sixty-Six, writer-director Barry Levinson pounds determinedly on the motif of flawed memory, and the gaps that our unhelpfully arbitrary minds insert into our histories. But for Levinson's dull, naïve characters, faulty recall isn't the only mental stumbling block: Basic cognitive failure and inability to learn from experience are just as endemic. Sixty-Six plods through an erratic first-person narrative from the perspective of Bobby Shine, one of five members of a clique of Baltimore boys growing up in the '50s and '60s. They're not quite the Baltimore clique from Levinson's 1982 directorial debut Diner, but they've got the same fear of commitment, change, marriage, and the future, and their lives also center on their local diner, where they rehash their glory days and hold the outside world at bay. As Sixty-Six progresses, Bobby quits law school and takes a low-level TV-studio job, to his fiancée's horror. Meanwhile, his buddy, former "King Of The Teenagers" Ben Kallin, marries and struggles with his newly bland and ordinary life, while their mutual friend Neil Tilden begins taking LSD and acting erratically. Vietnam, the civil-rights movement, and the rise of the counterculture take place in the background, but apart from concern over the draft and the revelation that hippie women don't wear bras, Bobby and his friends live exclusively in their tiny personal dramas, which become more dramatic with every chapter. As they engage in increasingly radical behavior which they're at a loss to explain or understand, Levinson repeatedly points out their blinkered reactions to current events, fetishizing their uninformed self-absorption into a nostalgic innocence. His characters face the larger world around them with ignorance, helplessness, and fear, reactions that extend to their hands-off dealings with Ben and Neil's respective downward spirals. Such limited perspectives are common enough, but they make for a narrow, uninteresting story that becomes absurd whenever Bobby dignifies his juvenile worldview with stiff, faux-noble maundering. "The new reality of adulthood–the reality I was so aware of that night–carves a wider path where laughs and tears exist simultaneously," he opines at one point. Shortly thereafter, a poorly choreographed tragedy deflates his philosophical balloon, leading him to say "I wished desperately that what I was seeing now was just a movie, but I knew that it was all too real; no movie could ever be this sad." He's wrong, of course: Many movies, Levinson's Rain Man and Wag The Dog among them, are sadder, largely because their characters' lives and limitations find meaning outside of themselves. Levinson seems to acknowledge Sixty-Six's lack of affect in his opening chapter, when Bobby describes his memories as having "little consequence and no revelatory insights," and wonders whether they're "important enough to explore." Good question.