Yet however familiar these Baltimore guys may be, the cast of Sixty-Six remains an engaging lot, depicted by Levinson with wit and wry affection. While Bobby Shine is clearly the lucky, ambitious one -- the one who will eventually leave Baltimore to seek his fortune, as Levinson did, in California -- the other diner habitues seem headed toward disappointment.
Neil, always given to enigmatic actions, perversely destroys a letter that might have given him a reprieve from the draft and heads off, reluctantly, to boot camp. Ben, once known as the "King of the Teenagers," finds his marriage spiraling into disaster and his expectations of life hurtling even lower. Turko and Eggy, "the Abbott and Costello" of the group, seem caught in a kind of perpetual adolescence, trying to decode the mysteries of love and sex. These characters' lives have been defined by their late-night bull sessions at the diner and when the restaurant is sold, they understand that a chapter of their lives has closed.
Like Levinson's Baltimore movies (Diner, Tin Men,Avalon and Liberty Heights), Sixty-Six is, in retrospect, an elegy: it is not only a story about a group of guys trying to (or trying not to) grow up, but also a story about change and flux and goodbyes.
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