Richard Linklater's low-budget talkie defies expectations. The hour-and-a-half long film is set in the claustrophobic confines of a dingy hotel room. It is shot on video, albeit high definition video. There is no gun, no explosions, or other gimmicks. You expect to be shifting impatiently in your seat after twenty minutes, but instead it grabs hold of you from the start and keeps you hooked.

The film opens with dishevelled drugs dealer Vince (Ethan Hawke), rushing around his hotel room in Lansing Michigan apparently making preparations. He goes through a bizarre beer-drinking ritual in the bathroom. He chugs a can in one while simultaneously pouring another down the sink.

Then life-long friend and filmmaker Johnny (Robert Sean Leonard), in town to present his movie the following day, knocks at the door. After some initial friendly jousting, the tenor of the conversation turns darker as Vince starts to prise out of the initially dismissive and increasingly defensive Johnny details of a date rape of a mutual girlfriend, Amy (Uma Thurman) twelve years earlier.

After initially taking the moral ground with his waster friend, Johnny finds the tables turning, and his own sense of self being rocked as he is forced to confront his past.

Linklater has gone back to basics for this sparse production. Focusing on script, performance and storytelling yields results. Stephen Belber's psychological drama is a good starting point with its sense of constantly shifting reality as each of the characters' memories and emotions are peeled back and held up to the light. What's more, the narrative has pace and is injected with witty dialogue and humour. Considering the limitations of the location - think enclosed and minimal - the camera is also surprisingly fluid and creative in expression.

Ethan Hawke, in danger of being written off as lightweight, throws everything he's got into his performance and comes up trumps. He is edgy and unpredictable, the one minute exuberant and hilarious, the next irascible and confrontational.

Robert Sean Leonard is less colourful, but then that's probably what is called for here. He might have gone deeper with his character, but his straight act makes a good foil for Hawke's kookiness.

Meanwhile, Uma Thurman is well up to the task as the smart and attractive career woman whose self-possession seems to belie hidden depths of hurt.

The one quibble is that after weaving its web of suspicion and counter-suspicion, bluff and double-bluff, the drama doesn't tie-up as neatly as you would like. But then maybe that's just a case of art imitating life?