The reviews lean strongly positive, and the praise gathers in the same two places: Levinson’s script and the ensemble that speaks it. Most critics single out the dialogue, the overlapping talk around the diner tables and the exactness of the period, late-1950s Baltimore on the eve of something the characters cannot see coming. The cast is described as first-rate almost across the board, with Mickey Rourke and Ellen Barkin named more than once, and several reviews note how much the film’s staying power owes to the chemistry of a group who were then unknown.
The spread is narrow with one clear outlier. Six of the seven reviews sit within ten points of each other; the seventh, from Variety, grants Levinson his realistic characters and dialogue but finds the story dark and depressing, without hope or uplift, and hard to watch. Nobody else raises that complaint. Later critics, if anything, read the same lack of incident as the point, calling it a hangout film whose low stakes are the appeal.