Kinney takes on the big screen

Gary Sinise has done it. So has John Malkovich. And now it's the turn of Terry Kinney, another Steppenwolf Theatre veteran trying his hand at directing a feature film.

"Diminished Capacity," a small, independent movie starring some high-profile actors -- including Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda and Virginia Madsen -- opened this week at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, following initial showings at the Sundance and Gen Art film festivals. Based on a novel of the same name by Sherwood Kiraly, it's the semi-comic story of Cooper (Broderick), a political columnist for a Chicago newspaper who suffers a concussion, is faced with short-term memory problems and finds himself relegated to the comic strip pages.

Things grow increasingingly complicated when Cooper takes a trip home to rural Missouri to help out his aging uncle, Rollie (Alda), who also is beginning to show signs of diminished memory. Another trip is set in motion when the two men, along with Cooper's long-ago high school crush, Charlotte (Madsen), head off to a memorabilia expo in Chicago, clutching Rollie's most valuable keepsake, a Chicago Cubs baseball card.

"The actors in this film, including Steppenwolf ensemble members Lois Smith, Jim True-Frost and Jeff Perry [one of Steppenwolf's three 'founding fathers'] all understand how to take on and 'wear' a character, rather than just letting things fly on an impulse as many film actors do."

Kinney himself shows no signs of diminshed capacity. In fact, this is a very busy time for him. His Off Broadway production of Neil LaBute's new play, "reasons to be pretty" -- a look at the warping power and influence of physical beauty in American culture -- was so well-received that it's now slated to move to Broadway in February, with Kinney reprising his directing chores. He also is hard at work with longtime Chicago pal Tim Evans (producer of "Diminished Capacity") to get their dream project transformed into a reality.

"Tim and I, along with Gary [Sinise] and Jeff [Perry], have developed lots of material with Steppenwolf," said Kinney, 54, whose black-rimmed glasses, baseball cap and 1950s-style print shirt give him a playfully retro look.

"We're trying to make a real, dark, dramatic piece based on a famous book, but we're still having some problems with the writer's estate," he said. "And the dream is to do everything here, in Chicago, using the fabulous actors and crews that live here, and maybe even creating some kind of permanent mini-studio. The crucial thing is to get fully financed by those in the funding community here, as opposed to having to be in bed with the Los Angeles money sources."

Of course, there are more immediate issues to deal with, too. Kinney, now divorced from actress Kathryn Erbe (Detective Alex Eames on NBC's "Law & Order: Criminal Intent"), shares responsibility for their two children, Maeve, 12, and Carson, 4. And on the day last week when he hopped a plane from New York (he lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn) to publicize his film in Chicago, he received an urgent cell phone call from his son's school saying the child had soaked his clothes and shoes by running under a sprinkler, and that his babysitter needed to deliver some dry things. All in a day's work.

Any talk about "Diminished Capacity" invariably leads to a discussion of Kinney's own neurasthenic issues. Though he has directed a slew of stage plays, it has been more than a dozen years since he has appeared on a stage as an actor, though he has worked extensively on such television series as "CSI: New York" and "Oz," appeared as Matthew Shepard's father in the HBO special "The Laramie Project," and this spring played Deputy Attorney General Zach Williams in the Fox legal series, "Canterbury's Law." (He is now shooting a pilot for a new ABC show, "The Unusuals," which he described as "a very funny, almost David Lynchian story about New York cops.")

"Joan Allen has me beat; I think it's been 18 years since she has been on a stage, but now she's going back next season," Kinney said. (Allen will co-star with Jeremy Irons on Broadway in Michael Jacobs' new play, "Impressionism," in spring 2009.) "I'm thinking about going back, too, and I keep asking Tracy [Letts, author of the Tony Award-winning 'August: Osage County'] to write me a male version of Deanna Dunagan's character. Tracy thinks I should ease back with a supporting role, but I want something central and difficult, and ideally something new."

What has kept Kinney in the wings all these years was an incident during the run of the 1995 Steppenwolf revival of Sam Shepard's "Buried Child."

"I was playing the oldest son, Tilden -- a very intense, concentrated role in which you have to keep your breathing very still, and you're thinking about a dead baby and a terrible deal with the devil, " Kinney recalled. "It was the second act of the second show we were doing one weekend, and I just blacked out from some sort of blood sugar thing. But it haunted me, and I started to feel trapped by the repetition of stage acting. It was a weird feeling, too, because I loved acting so much."

So the issues of memory and the games the mind can play that are so much a part of "Diminished Capacity" certainly appealed to Kinney, even if his initial reading of Kiraly's self-penned screenplay more than five years ago did not.

"In fact, it was one of the worst things I'd ever read," he said. "I didn't appreciate the story until my then wife, Kathryn, read the book, loved it, and told me to do the same. Eventually, Sherwood and I holed up in hotel rooms while he did the writing and I acted out the parts, and we finally got a screenplay that did justice to the book.

"Above all, I wanted the film to create its own sense of time, with a kind of dreamlike quality to the whole thing. It's really a simple little story that asks the question: What are memories worth to you? It's not an examination of dementia of the sort that Sarah Polley did so beautifully in her film 'Away from Her.' This is more a story of people who still have some abilities and are seeking some correction for their diminishment."

Although the movie is set in Missouri and Chicago, and some of the film's exteriors were shot in downstate Illinois (where Kinney grew up, and where his parents, now in their late 80s, still live), most of the filming was done in Beacon, New York, near the Hudson River.

"In fact, we used the big old house where folksinger Pete Seeger used to live," said Kinney. "We searched for the right spot for quite some time, but most of the places we saw looked too northeastern. Then our art director was driving around, pulled down a gravel road, passed a trailer park and spotted this giant, dilapidated house now occupied by Seeger's daughter. People have commented on the great art direction, but the truth is, the unbelievable clutter in the place was there when we found it."

Kinney, who said he learned how to direct movies by "trailing other directors" throughout his career, names Carol Reed's "The Third Man," Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and another French film, Jacques Audiard's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" as some of his all-time favorites. "I love movies with a sense of displacement -- movies that can carve out their own place in the world and take you with them."