[In the following review, Macnab pans State and Main for a loosely formed plot, laborious visual gags, and a lack of deftness usually displayed in Mamet's work.]

A movie crew arrives in Waterford, Vermont to shoot a feature [in Mamet's film, State and Main]. Director Walt Price needs an old mill for the film, which is set in the 19th century, but discovers the town doesn't have one—although its tourist brochure claims otherwise. Writer Joe White is assigned to revise his screenplay to make the most of Waterford as it stands. When his manual typewriter goes missing, bookshop owner Ann Black provides him with a replacement. Ann becomes friends with Joe and breaks off her engagement to Doug Mackenzie, an ambitious local politician.

Meanwhile, lead actress Claire objects to scenes requiring nudity. When Joe stands up for her, she is so grateful she comes to his room and tries to seduce him. Ann sees her there, but accepts Joe's explanation for her presence. Lead actor Bob Barrenger, who has a weakness for seducing underage girls, crashes a car while out with local teenager Carla Taylor. Joe witnesses the accident.

Walt and his producer Marty Rossen offend the town mayor by failing to attend a dinner party in their honour. When he learns that Carla was involved in the car crash with Barrenger, Doug threatens to close the production down. Its future hinges on Joe's testimony. Joe initially lies about what happened, then tells the truth. With Joe's testimony, Doug could ruin the filmmakers and disgrace Barrenger; but instead he accepts a massive bribe from Marty. The movie is allowed to go ahead as planned.

It's hard to work out exactly what David Mamet feels about the film industry. In his 1988 play Speed-the-Plow he viciously satirised Hollywood's obsession with money, sex and status, but that hasn't stopped him from working there, both as a writer-for-hire and on projects he originated himself. In his essay ‘A Playwright in Hollywood’ (collected in his 1994 book A Whore's Profession), he claims that “writing for the movies taught me … to stick to the plot and not to cheat.” It also helped him rediscover “an abiding concern for the audience.”

A wry yarn about what happens when a big film crew pitches up in a small town, State and Main suggests Mamet is fast becoming part of the industry mainstream. Admittedly, the filmmakers here are as venal as their counterparts in Speed-the-Plow—the director and his terrier-like producer bully, browbeat and bribe anyone who gets in the way of the picture. Nor do they have exalted ideas about their own artistic integrity—when they are offered money to advertise an IT company in their movie, which is set in the 19th century, they immediately find a way of getting around the anachronism. But Mamet is very gentle on them: if anything, he seems to admire their resourcefulness and opportunism. His refusal to strike a censorious note even extends to the characterisation of the libido-driven star, played by Alec Baldwin (an astute piece of casting), who has sex with a minor. Mamet refuses to moralise at his expense, and the possibility that his behaviour might prompt a scandal is presented as just another problem with which the filmmakers must deal.

The comedy is more whimsical than barbed, with Mamet taking soft pot shots at easy targets—the nymphomaniac actress who refuses to take her clothes off for the camera, the perfectionist cinematographer and the long-suffering assistant director are straight from stock. Likewise, there are shades of the title character from the Coen brothers' Barton Fink in the nervous, solemn playwright who takes his work very seriously and is not yet accustomed to the compromises of big-budget filmmaking. Mamet claims to have drawn on his “own adventures in Hollywood” (his first script, for Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice, had to be rewritten several times) but many of the characters and situations here echo those found in other films-about-film-making such as Alan Alda's Sweet Liberty (1985) and Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion (1995).

If the film-crew types are overly familiar, so are the eccentric townsfolk. Mamet provides us with a blustering mayor (who shares the same name, George Bailey, as James Stewart's character in Frank Capra's 1947 paean to small-town life It's a Wonderful Life), various old-timers making small talk in the coffee shop and a bookshop owner who seems infinitely more talented than any of the Hollywood big shots. Mamet goes to such lengths to portray the inhabitants of this sleepy pocket of Americana as folksy, neighbourly types that it's inevitable we will see a darker side. But the revelation when it comes—that the townsfolk are just as capable of subterfuge as the film crew in their midst—hardly matches the subversive punch of, say, David Lynch's portraits of seemingly idyllic small-town existence.

Generally, Mamet's plots are tightly coiled affairs, but here there are some loose ends. In one scene the cinematographer destroys a plate-glass window above the fire station, a supposedly cherished historical monument—and yet nobody mentions his act of vandalism. The visual gags—the smudging of the white board, for instance, on which the film crew's invitation to dinner with the mayor is written—are likewise laboriously handled. There's none of the deftness of touch displayed by a director like Preston Sturges, whose ensemble comedies Mamet has cited as an inspiration for State and Main. Perhaps screwball comedy just isn't his genre: amiable in its own way, but toothless by comparison with his best work, State and Main ends up seeming like Mamet at half throttle.