True story: six months before Richard Nixon resigned, in 1974, screw-up husband, father and salesman Samuel Byck tried to take him out, in a prescient 9/11 scenario, by hijacking a jet and crashing it into the White House.

Byck failed but died trying. This prototypical little-guy loser felt betrayed by his family, his job and his country. He viewed Tricky Dick as the symbol of his torment. First-time director and co-writer Niels Mueller saw Byck (called Bicke to allow for fictional finagling) as a means to investigate the psychological underpinings of the American dreamer betrayed. It's a fierce and noble quest that Mueller doesn't quite pull off.

No matter. The reliably brilliant Sean Penn does. Penn gets the look right (the mustache, the polyester suits) and the halting speech. But the beauty of this astonishing performance, a worthy follow-up to his Oscar role in Mystic River, is the way Penn finds the loneliness that isolates Bicke from his waitress wife (Naomi Watts), his friend (Don Cheadle), his boss (Jack Thompson), his brother (a superb Michael Wincott) and, ultimately, the world. It isn't easy to watch Bicke deteriorate into madness — this riveting film qualifies as the anti-crowd-pleaser — but Penn makes it unthinkable to turn away.

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.