from February 02, 2010

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Mike Starr in “Chicago Overcoat”

Mike Starr has done his share of mob movies. The veteran character actor and onetime Chicagoan starred in the local “Osso Bucco” and has done supporting turns in “Goodfellas” and dozens of features and TV shows.

When the young filmmakers of Beverly Ridge Pictures approached him in 2007 to co-star in their take on the genre, “Chicago Overcoat,” everything clicked.

“I liked the chance to play a South Side guy who talked like people I knew, to put another regionalism on film,” Starr says. Plus he’d get to work again with old friends Frank Vincent, Armand Assante, and Danny Goldring. And he’d get to play a boss for once.

“Chicago Overcoat” on Tuesday opened the 2010 season of the Midwest Independent Film Festival.

Starr plays the presiding underboss of the Outfit’s Bridgeport crew, running things while the boss (Armand Assante) is incarcerated pending trial. Frank Vincent stars as a former hitman working his first contract in years, to eliminate witnesses against Assante and finance his Vegas retirement.

Danny Goldring is the obsessive, alcoholic detective who picks up the scent when Vincent gets back in the game.

“I joked with Frank about how I was the boss this time and he had to come and work for me,” says Starr, who’s better known for playing muscle.

In addition to “Goodfellas,” Starr had worked with Vincent on the 1997 indie comedy “The Deli.” “I was a gambler, and he was the guy I owed money to,” Starr says. “It was a fun comedy.”

“I’d worked with Danny on ‘Easy Street,’ one of the best pilots ever made,” Starr says. “This was by Paul Haggis, and it was about the Irish mob. It was a few years before ‘The Sopranos.’ I guess it’s all in the timing.”

When “Overcoat” premiered last October at the Chicago International Film Festival, some viewers questioned the film’s morality—Vincent is a very dark antihero. “When I first read it, I had questions too,” Starr says.

“I said ‘wait a minute, this ain’t right.’ But this is what made films so interesting the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I didn’t think it was a mob movie per se. Danny’s character is almost an Ahab figure, and Frank was going through his own redemption.”

Starr lived in Chicago from 1999-2005 when his wife, a pediatric heart surgeon, worked at UIC and the University of Chicago, before they moved so she could take a position in Newark. Starr’s son started studying film last year at Columbia College with a cinematography concentration.

Next out for Starr is “The Irishman,” a ‘70s Cleveland mob drama the shot in Detroit last year, due out on St. Patrick’s day.

See midwestfilm.com. —Ed M. Koziarski

Ed M. Koziarski is co-director of the feature film “The First Breath of Tengan Rei”. Email:

I worked on "Ice Harvest" with Mike Starr, and although he usually plays the heavy, he is one of the kindest guys you will ever meet! —Bruce Ventura, Teamster local 727

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