Bacon, Penn Give Oscar-Worthy Portraits of Losers

By Bob Mondello

Published January 1, 2005 at 10:00 PM MST

NPR's Bob Mondello reviews the performances of two actors who are expected to garner Oscar nominations for their performances: Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. Both actors give harrowing psychological portraits of outsiders — Bacon plays a former child molester in The Woodsman and Penn plays a down-and-out salesman in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Bob Mondello

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.