In 1964, legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell delivered a two-part article on Joe Gould, a wildly eccentric panhandler from Greenwich Village and author of The Oral History Of Our Time, an ongoing project transcribed on stacks of school composition books. Mitchell had visited him once before for a 1942 piece called "Professor Seagull," and their relationship clearly haunted him: For the last 32 years of his life, he dutifully reported to his office every day but never published another article again. Stanley Tucci's gentle and modestly quizzical Joe Gould's Secret explores the odd parallels between two men who would seem to have nothing in common. As played in a deftly modulated performance by Tucci, Mitchell is a soft-spoken and deferential Southerner with a tendency to recede into the woodwork; by contrast, Ian Holm's charismatic Gould is a raving wonder of unchecked bravado, full of genius and hot gas in equal measure. But in time, their lives seem to converge over a shared love of the city and an inability to give form to their observations. (At one point, Gould claims his unfinished 25-year history has crested a million words.) After the frenetic physical shtick that marred Tucci's last film, The Impostors, Joe Gould's Secret marks a welcome return to the warmth and understatement of his (and co-director Campbell Scott's) memorable debut, Big Night. His sensitivity to the dynamics of male relationships draws out rich themes—the exploitative nature of journalist and subject, the rigors necessary to bring a work to fruition, the fusion of likeminded personalities—without calling attention to them. In fact, if Joe Gould's Secret has a problem, it may be that Tucci doesn't dramatize the material enough, resulting in a few flat scenes and a structure that could charitably be described as loose. But for a film that so subtly evokes New York in the '40s and two dauntingly complex figures who sought to define it, those are minor consequences.