In "Payday," Rip Torn takes advantage of a rare leading role and runs with it. In this film, he plays Maury Dann, a country musician, who is currently at a crossroads in his career. His manager Clarence(Michael C. Gwynne) advises him to take some time off in Nashville, where he can record a little, and maybe appear on Johnny Cash's show, after a concert in Birmingham, so as to avoid a process server who may be looking for him. Maury, by contrast, wants to continue the tour into New England. For the time being, all he wants to do after the concert is to drink beer and have sex. "Payday" is a modest character study of somebody who is not modest in the least, answering the question once and for all as to whether talent has any connection with how good a person is. For Maury, it all comes down to his past which he can never escape, either his mother(Cara Dunn) who he supports and visits occasionally or his children that he has lost touch with. This was also filmed at an interesting time for the South, just after it had recently integrated.

Rip Torn is fucking amazing in this flick. I have always appreciated him, but felt it was sad that most people will remember him for Men in Black and Dodgeball (which he was funny in, but, still..) because you see him in a performance like this. The script is pretty interesting but takes some dumb, movie cliche turns that went against it's day in the life type story line. I could have watched Rip Torn talk to people all day, but they had to get a plot going and the co-stars are bad at best. The thing that saved this movie was the ending which I loved and wondered why the middle of the movie went so wrong.