It's early June 1999, the intersection of Division Street and Damen Avenue is blocked off, and there is a tiny patch of Division that glistens with the spray from stories-high rain towers. The downpour starts, stops, starts, as a couple under an umbrella run toward the shelter of a bar. A few steps south, the front of another neighborhood tavern, The Rainbo Club, has been yanked out, and temporary, light-admitting glass windows shatter the accustomed lumpen facade.
Most creative sorts cherish their notions of what's authentic to their own time.
A boy who must choose to become a man. Girl by girl, hope by hope, breakup by breakup, he has to examine his life. Cusack plays Rob Gordon, an indolent record shop owner. His apocryphal store, Championship Vinyl, is in a storefront at Milwaukee Avenue and Honore, where he and two clerks duel each day to out-arcana each other about pop music. Cusack's portrait of a narcissistic Peter Pan is the story's center.