Puppy Eyes, Sad Hair, and a Big Boom Box: The Films of John Cusack – Ranked! | film

20. Natty Gunn’s Journey (1985)

It’s the Great Depression, Disney-style, when tomboy Natty rides the rails in search of her lumberjack father. This was the first time I’d seen Cusack, impressive as a wise young tramp, though not the first time I’d seen Natty’s wolf companion: he’s good, the sled dog from The Thing!

19. Tape Heads (1988)

The Monkees’ Mike Nesmith produced this goofy ’80s slapstick comedy with a supporting cast and a top-notch soundtrack. Cusack (who has a sleazy feel) and Tim Robbins play losers whose rock video company booms in the wake of a Skylab-related tragedy.

Cusack temporarily returns to a teen movie character, but he’s too cool to be convincing as the list-gathering man in Nick Hornby’s novel, who is transferred to Chicago. If you don’t mind women being portrayed as killjoys with bad taste in music, then the portrayal of commitment-phobic masculinity with a gatekeeping approach to pop culture is fun and shallow.

17. Max (2002)

Set in 1918 Munich, Cusack plays a Jewish gallery owner who indulges the artistic aspirations of a disaffected army veteran (Noah Taylor) with a gift for anti-Semitic rhetoric. This Hitler origin story needed more Ken Russell-type polish, despite some dazzling artwork in which Cusack dives one-armed naked into a giant meat grinder.

Before turning to adult characters, Cusack delved into teen romantic comedies one last time in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut. Lloyd Dobler is a slacker who falls in love with the smartest girl in school. Their on-and-off romance once again features the famous engagement scene, as well as superlative supporting turns from Lili Taylor and Cusack’s sister Joan.

Between gruesome riffs from the likes of John Malkovich and Ving Rhames as convicts who hijack their plane, Cusack plays the bystander as an understandably sweaty U.S. Marshal. Nicolas Cage stars as a heroic prisoner on parole who must thwart psychopaths in a stupid but distracting action-fest.

14. The Fat Man and the Little Boy (1989)

Paul Newman plays General Groves (played by Matt Damon in Oppenheimer’s film), who is tasked with overseeing the development of the first atomic bomb. But it is Cusack who haunts the memory as a (fictional) scientist suffering the consequences of a laboratory accident. After doing some math, he says, “Everyone should succeed, except me. I’m going to die.”

As Woody Allen’s understudy in one of Woodster’s zany post-Farrow comedies, set in 1920s New York, Cusack is a playwright who gets financing for her production by casting a gangster character – only to find that her gangster bodyguard is a better writer than he is. Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest is an alcoholic actress. “Don’t talk!”

12. The Sure Thing (1985)

Before landing a small role in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, Cusack starred in the same director’s teen smash hit It Happened One Night. “Gib” Gibson is a beer-drinking naive whose plan to have sex with a hot girl in California is derailed when he takes part in a cross-country trip with a fellow student.

11. Eight Men Out (1988)

John Sayles’ meticulous historical drama is a useful primer on the Chicago Black Sox scandal, a major reference in American popular culture. A group of baseball players, aggrieved by management’s refusal to award a well-deserved bonus, agree to hold the 1919 World Series. In a stacked cast, Cusack takes on one of his first adult roles as Buck Weaver, the down-on-his-luck guy.

10. 2012 (2009)

Can sci-fi novelist Cusack reunite with his wife before director Roland Emmerich destroys the planet with solar flares, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions? Naturally, the billionaires devised a plan to survive this disastrous movie with a body count in the billions. Too bad they don’t all meet the fate of love rival Cusack, who is murdered in the most sadistic way possible.

This deranged slice of Southern Gothic is famous for having Nicole Kidman urinate on Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings, but Cusack leaves it all out looking like a racist, swamp-dwelling, alligator-chasing creep with a sad Nic Cage hairdo. She’s never lived until she’s seen Kidman orgasm In the prison visiting room!

A neurotic pianist (Elijah Wood) receives a message saying “Play one wrong note and you’re dead” during a concert. Cusack exudes malicious menace in a key vocal role as the bad guy in this preposterous thriller. Eugenio Mera clearly can’t get a single scene out of Damien Chazelle’s screenplay without doing something great with it.

7. Identity (2003)

Stranded by a rainstorm in a remote Nevada hotel, ten people are killed one by one in James Mangold’s psychological thriller And Then There Were None. Cusack plays a Sartre-reading ex-cop who tries to solve the mystery and stumbles upon a plot that irritated me on first viewing, but proves to be more enjoyable on rewatch.

Deep in his evil phase, Cusack is terrified as a famous therapist, whose karma looms in the form of his pyromaniac daughter, returns to Los Angeles to confront her family and their dark secrets. David Cronenberg takes no prisoners in his bleak but brilliant satire of Hollywood; Julianne Moore gives a spunky performance as a drug-addicted, constipated movie star.

This non-linear Brian Wilson biopic weaves together Paul Dano as Wilson in the 1960s with Cusack as the embodiment of intense treatment in the 1980s. In the 1960s, he revolutionized pop music with inspired tinkering in the studio, but he already suffered from mental illness. In the 1980s, he was enslaved by an evil doctor, but was saved by the love of a good woman.

4. 1408 (2007)

A writer enters a haunted hotel room, where he must grapple not only with ghosts but with his own traumatic past in this chilling adaptation of a Stephen King story. Despite a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson, it’s really a one-man show for Cusack, who rises to the occasion with a gifted display of suspicion-turning-paranoia and refrigerator-screaming.

Two years before Tony Soprano had his first anxiety attack, Cusack co-produced and wrote this dark comedy about a depressed hitman (Alan Arkin plays his therapist) attending his high school reunion. The tone is mostly ambiguous, but there are dark hints about the moral relativism of modern America, and Cusack embodies the fine art of deadpan.

Cusack has left teen movies behind him once and for all with his performance as a suave but scheming con man in this stark adaptation (by Donald E. Westlake) of Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled 1963 novel about three small-time crooks. Bleach-blonde Anjelica Huston plays his mother, Annette Bening, his sexy girlfriend. It’s a sordid Greek tragedy with great performances and a dark, unforgettable ending.

Cusack asked his agent for “the craziest, unproducible script you could find,” and the result was Spike Jonze’s directorial debut. Cusack, with the saddest hair imaginable, has a ball exploring his dark side as an angry street puppeteer who discovers a secret portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich. This is just the beginning of Charlie Kaufman’s endlessly inventive screenplay that raises questions about identity, gender, and control in a surreal cocktail, enhanced by realistic spectacle that eschews flashy special effects.