A master playwright can drop his characters in one setting for an entire play and take them to other places off-stage through skillful dialogue. David Mamet is such a playwright. In American Buffalo, one of his early plays rewritten for the screen by Mamet, we spend an hour and a half in a junk shop without ever realizing that we never leave the same location.

We look over a character’s shoulder at a display case one moment, and the next thing we know, he will remember something aloud, transporting us into his memory miles away. As they share stories and plans, the characters never leave the junk shop, though the lines are so rich that our imaginations take control of what we see on the screen. With lines that rival poetry (though they are heavily laced with obscenity), Mamet’s writing comes across as the work of a modern-day Shakespeare. Like the bard himself, Mamet writes rich, meaningful lines and hides them convincingly in the mouths of everyday characters.

American Buffalo requires only three actors, though the characters create twice as many through conversation. The character never seen in the play though undeniably the center of everything that happens is a coin collector who stops by Donny (Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue) Dubrow’s shop one afternoon. Everything about the collector is recounted through dialogue by Franz, though after the movie is over you will feel like you had seen his visit to the junk shop. The collector spots a buffalo nickel in one of Donny’s display cases and agrees to pay $90 for it. After the customer leaves, Donny looks up the coin in a price guide only to discover that it is worth ten times as much as the man gave him.

Feeling cheated, Donny plans to find out where the man lives and break in to his house. Instead of stealing only the nickel, Donny hopes to clean out the man’s entire coin collection. He assigns the job of tracking the customer to Bobby (Fresh’s Sean Nelson), a kid who runs errands for Donny. Bobby is a young man who needs a break, and Donny treats him like a son, doing his best to help the kid out.

Enter Walter “Teach” Cole (Dustin Hoffman). Teach is Donny’s self-proclaimed friend, though their friendship seems to be nothing more than a matter of how well they can tolerate one another. Stopping by Donny’s junk shop for some conversation, Teach uncovers Donny’s plan to steal the coins and immediately demands to be a part of it. He begs Donny to leave the boy out of the picture so he can have a chance at the job instead, refusing to back down until Donny agrees. The moment Donny reluctantly gives in, Teach takes control of the situation and everything takes a turn for the worst.

In American Buffalo, Dustin Hoffman reinvents the character of Willy Loman he portrayed in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willy is a salesman with a dream, a dream in which, despite anything that gets in his way, he has the right to make his living and support his family. In Miller’s play, Willy dies a failure. Only four people attend the funeral, and they wonder “Why didn’t anybody come?” Teach is the same type of character as Willy Loman. When Teach dies, Donny is the only person likely to attend his funeral. Teach thinks he deserves a chance, and he snatches at Donny’s idea. He’s been cheated his entire life and now is his opportunity to redeem himself, even if it isn’t legitimate.

American Buffalo is filled with hot-tempered arguments and begins to wear on your nerves. For long periods of time, things seem to be going nowhere. In actuality, while the robbery isn’t any nearer, quite a bit is happening between the two characters. Using Teach’s idea that he deserves this last chance and Donny’s fear that Teach will mess everything up, the script allows the business venture to unravel the pair’s friendship.

Full of unvented anger and energy, Hoffman’s Teach is a frightening character. He invests all of himself in his last hope, going as far as to sell his last valuable possession so he can buy a revolver for the robbery. On the opposite end is Donny, extremely patient with Teach’s outbursts while quickly approaching the end of his tolerance for his friend. Franz proves time and time again that he is perfect for the role, portraying Donny as a character who wants to please everybody, despite the fact that he may never achieve his own goals. In one scene, he watches Teach destroy his shop and then forgives him after things die down. Such a reaction is almost unbelievable to the audience, though a crucial and well-acted moment by Franz.

Talented actors can only carry a movie so far as we learn from the many films that bury actors in clichés. The real master behind American Buffalo is David Mamet, whose original script lifts its characters from the set and lets them roam free in your mind. Pulitzer-winning Mamet is no novice at his trade. His other works include his play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the script for Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables and a dismal look into the world of real estate salesmen with Glengarry Glen Ross. (You might want to check out Roger Ebert’s review of Glengarry Glen Ross, one of his best-written critiques.) Mamet is known for his distinctive ways of telling us that sometimes Capitalism and the American dream do not go hand-in-hand. In American Buffalo, we are reminded not to mix friendship with business as we watch Donny and Teach learn the hard way. American Buffalo is a startling movie. It is not a movie about a robbery; it is a movie about the people and the dreams at stake behind a robbery.