Wenders' talent shines through in a few pure and hauntingly beautiful scenes, but on the whole I found the film to be a bit tedious and not fulfilling its potential.

Ray/Wenders film, like Nick's chaotic life, is an act of pure honesty, even though we sense everything here was scripted, acted, directed. This is when fiction gets bigger than life. And I guess Ray knew that better than any other filmmaker.

Almost anything they could have shot would have been more interesting than what we get in this movie. We could have had a retrospective of the life and movies of Nicholas Ray. We could have had Wenders talking about how he came to admire Ray's work and later to meet him. We could have just had a couple of internationally acclaimed filmmakers just sittin' 'round talkin'. But no. Instead we have a lot of just wandering around... including TEN WHOLE MINUTES wasted on a performance artist