If he had been born 20 years earlier, Peter Greene probably would have become a household name. Since he began his career in the early years of the Sundance ’90s and he didn’t have a single nerdy or twee color on his acting palette, he had to fall back on the last resort of most successful actors: major talent. This kept him steadily working in an era where his Lee Marvin tough-but-tender vibe was no longer in vogue, but would have made him a movie star in the ’70s. Before Hollywood settled on “bad guy” as his template, though, he starred in CLEAN, SHAVEN, where his character Peter doesn’t so much do battle with mental illness as adapt to it. It’s like the old saying about fish not realizing they’re in water until the fisherman hooks them.
Director Lodge Kerrigan spends the opening ten minutes or so letting us swim in Peter’s world before hooking us. Dialogue-free, grainy, with a jarring background buzz of hisses, pops, crackles, errant snippets of what might be radio transmissions and what might be innermost thoughts, Kerrigan interprets for us what life with schizophrenia might be like day to day, before turning on the narrative machine (but at the lowest setting). Peter is clearly not on the same wavelength as the rest of us, but he spares us the routine “screaming breakdown” or “sobbing for a cure” scenes; he seems, more or less, acclimated to his illness. Or maybe that’s what madness feels like to the mad. Like a fish not understanding the concept of being wet.
Peter spends the movie haltingly making his way to find his daughter, now placed with an adoptive mother with the help of Peter’s own mother, who fears his condition will be inherited. Meanwhile a chance roadside encounter with a screeching brat leads Peter to homicide. Maybe. At least a horny police detective thinks so. The movie rumbles through several happenings like a kidnapping and a chase and a showdown with guns, but it’s probably silly and even misguided to expect a rigorous plotline from this story, because the plot is taking place in Peter’s mind, on the neurochemical level. Gag-inducing scenes of Peter gouging surgically-implanted surveillance transmitters out of his scalp and from under his fingernail seem to confirm he’s insane, but the sounds DO subside for a time, and something close to balance returns to him while he’s talking to his flat-voiced daughter. Were there actually microchips in his body? Did he actually even cut them out or just imagine it? Is his daughter even real? Am I actually typing this review?
Peter Greene lived a hard life and died a rotten death. Homeless at 15, began selling and using hard drugs shortly thereafter, attempted suicide at 36. Never really seemed to shake his addictions. In December 2025, a day before a scheduled surgery, Greene accidentally shot himself, in the armpit of all places, and bled to death in his Manhattan apartment. A note found by his body read, “I’m still a Westie,” presumably a reference to the Hell’s Kitchen gang of Irish hoodlums. There’s a story there, but like the story portrayed by Greene in CLEAN, SHAVEN, his one great starring role, it’s a story the protagonist kept to himself, all the way to the end.
