Made in 1996 but only recently released on home video, Sweethearts stars a smartly typecast Janeane Garofalo as a suicidally depressed, bipolar woman who vows to commit suicide on her 31st birthday, and takes a hapless blind date (Mitch Rouse) along for the ride. Tapping into the same deep vein of urban loneliness and paranoia that fueled Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Sweethearts is less a comedy or drama than a pitch-black fable about the limits of compassion and empathy. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Sweethearts boasts the finest and most multi-dimensional performance of Garofalo's career. Freed from the predictable romantic-comedy strictures that undermined her work in The Truth About Cats And Dogs and Matchmaker, Sweethearts finally affords Garofalo the opportunity to play a character who's not a sass-talking best friend or an ugly duckling in need of a charming man to find the beauty deep within her, but a fully formed character who defies easy categorization. The most compelling thing about Garofalo has always been her willingness to make audiences uncomfortable, and Sweethearts exploits that virtue for all it's worth. At once enormously likable and disturbingly self-obsessed and fatalistic, Garofalo's character here desperately defies audience expectations. The film flirts with romantic-comedy conventions, but thankfully avoids the obligatory pat ending in favor of something darker and more true-to-life. Rouse is a bit bland as Garofalo's potential suitor but, that small quibble aside, Sweethearts is a smart, surprisingly original sleeper that deserves to find an audience on home video.