In 1959, six college-aged friends hang out over Christmas, generally in or around “Fells Point Diner” in Baltimore. Boogie (Mickey Rourke) attends law school and works in a hair salon by day. In order to pay a gambling debt, he makes increasingly belligerent wagers with his buddies on how far Carol Heathrow will let him go on their dates.

Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) is a trust fund kid who stays drunk most of the time. Modell (Paul Reiser) is the group wit. Billy (Timothy Daly) comes home for the wedding of their friend Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), a Colts fan insisting his bride pass a 140-question test on football before the nuptials. Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is the only married man, but doesn’t know his wife (Ellen Barkin) used to go with Boogie.

Major events include Fenwick taking off his clothes and laying in the manger scene outside church. Shrevie gets upset at his wife when she doesn’t adhere to the filing procedure he’s instituted for his LP library. Modell wants Eddie to give him his roast beef sandwich, but refuses to ask if he can have it, instead asking Eddie if he’s going to finish it.

Barry Levinson was a screenwriter who had helped out writing Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety with Mel Brooks and company, and wrote … And Justice For All with his wife, Valerie Curtin. For his debut as a writer/director, MGM allotted Levinson a budget of $5 million and left him alone to shoot in Baltimore. The studio anticipated a silly high school comedy in the mode of Grease.

When executives saw the dailies, they were appalled. MGM released the movie in St. Louis and Phoenix, and the studio had no intention of running it anywhere else. A studio publicist persuaded MGM to screen it for critics, and a couple of them – including the influential Pauline Kael of the New York Times – raved about the film, even though it wasn’t playing anywhere.

MGM released Diner at a festival theater in New York, where with only two days notice, it broke house records. The studio still didn’t think it would make any money, and rolled it out one city at a time. It never really had a national release, but word of mouth grew, and it ended up grossing $14 million in the U.S., becoming a sleeper hit.

Fans have suggested that Diner is the progenor of Seinfeld, and the first comedy about “nothing.” The best moments in the picture are those that aspire to nothing, but reveal everything about the characters: the roast beef sandwich, a debate about Frank Sinatra versus Johnny Mathis, and the role music and sports trivia play in the daily lives of men.

The good scenes are few and far between. The movie has a nice charm and atmosphere. When it works, it works pretty well. A lot of stuff (Rourke wooing a blonde on horseback) doesn’t work at all. The heart-to-heart moments stick out as amateurish melodrama, and the overall lack of story made me wish this would end sooner than it did.

As for the casting, Reiser, Stern and Bacon are natural and instinctive, and handle improvisation extremely well. Rourke seems like he wants to be in another movie. Daly is a bit out of his league, while Guttenberg is an annoyance, setting the tone for many over-caffeinated performances during the ’80s.

Diner was nominated for an Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay for Levinson. It became the first of four films (and counting) he would write and direct taking place in the Baltimore of his youth. Tin Men concerned a comic vendetta between aluminum siding salesmen, Liberty Heights race relations and antisemitism, and Avalon the cultural impact suburbia and television had on family life in the 1950s.

Fells Point Diner was based on Brice’s Hilltop Diner, which Levinson patronized as a teenager. Brice’s had closed, so the production scavenged a diner graveyard in Long Island, and had a suitable facsimile shipped to Baltimore. Now named the Hollywood Diner, it was also seen in Sleepless In Seattle, and the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development uses it to train on-the-job cooking skills.