Going to the screening of Flawless was a last-second thing, but I thought I'd try to get someone to go with me anyway. I thought I'd try my friend Erin.

I told her it was by Joel Schumacher, the guy who did the Batman movies. She said she loved Jack Nicholson as the Joker. I hated to break it to her that that was Tim Burton's movie, the first Batman, and that Joel Schumacher did the later ones. She still seemed mildly interested.

"What's it about?" she asked. All I knew was that Robert De Niro plays a homophobic stroke victim who's rehabilitated by his drag queen neighbor. "Please. What is it REALLY about," she said. I went to the movie alone.

She could have given it a chance – it was free for God's sake. In this state of mind I was determined to like the thing just to spite Erin, who decided to go to the gym to rotate on some diabolical sweat machine instead.

The premise is a little more involved than the one I tried to entice Erin with. De Niro plays Walt Koontz. He's a neighborhood hero in New York's Lower East Side. He's retired now, but he used to be a bank guard who heroically saved the lives of hostages during a stickup a few years back. He lives alone in an SRO (single room occupancy) and has a pseudo girlfriend – a woman he tangos with at the local dance hall. He doesn't think of her as a hooker; he just "helps out" with the rent each time he sleeps with her.

Everything is okay in his life, except for that pesky drag queen, Rusty (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) upstairs. Rusty has a cabaret act with his drag-queen pals and they rehearse all day in his apartment – their songs echo down the airshaft. Our hero security guard deals with this by bellowing a daily Ralph Cramden-like "shut up you fucking fags" to blunt the reverberating queer chorus.

This isn't a great neighborhood. Dealers and hookers have the run of this SRO. The neighborhood kingpin, Mr. Z, has been ripped off. One night there's a melee in the building while Mr. Z shakes down a suspect. Walt creeps out of his apartment, service revolver drawn, trying, once again to be the hero, but this time he collapses, cut down by a crippling stroke.

He survives but is too ashamed of his condition to leave the house. Finally he gets physical therapy at home. The therapist tells him he should try singing lessons to help out his crippled voice. The next thing you know, Walt is taking voice lessons from his gay neighbor, Rusty.

After the movie I met up with Erin for dinner. I told her the story of Flawless from beginning to end, determined to make her feel like she missed out; her response was "that sounds dumb." She was right. But it wasn't the story that made it interesting, it was the good bits of acting that snuck through the weak plot.

De Niro is convincing and moving as a proud, stubborn security guard whose body fails. He never recuperates miraculously and his little baby steps to regaining control of his body all feel hard-won and genuine. His attempts to connect to women after his stroke are especially painful to watch.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a great self-deluded queen. While his character is huge and campy, he didn't seem to be trying too hard. Together, De Niro and Hoffman manage to overcome the stereotypes the script hands them.

So, those two performances are the good part, but the story pulls in the typical bad guys: that blasted Mr. Z, and his sidekicks who'll stop at nothing to get their loot. You've seen the Mr. Z story line a thousand times before; and the "don't ever deal in Mr. Z's territory again" tough-guy dialogue sounds like it was written by someone watching too many gangster movies.

It's not worth it to rip into all the cracks in the shaky script. It's enough to say that you see the ending coming down the highway like a pig-laden semi – and, you never ever have any doubt that Walt Koontz will once again be a hero.