The performance required him to inhabit a specific register that is very difficult to execute: the register of the genuinely dangerous person who is also genuinely charming. Most portrayals of violent characters fail in one of two directions — they are portrayed as so obviously dangerous that the charm is implausible, or they are portrayed as so charming that the violence is implausible. The specific challenge of playing a character like Mickey Knox is to hold both qualities simultaneously and let the audience experience the discomfort of finding someone repellent and compelling at the same moment.
Harrelson had, in his biography, access to the specific knowledge of what this looks like from the outside. He had described his father as “one of the most articulate, well-read, charming people I’ve ever known” — a man who was also a convicted murderer who had killed at least twice for money. The knowledge of what it looks like to encounter someone who is genuinely charming and also genuinely capable of violence is not available to most people in firsthand form. Whether that knowledge found its way into the performance, consciously or not, is not something that the available record documents. What the record documents is the performance itself, which is one of the most effective of his career.
The film was commercially successful — grossing approximately 116 million dollars on a budget of 34 million — and critically divisive, which is the standard outcome for films that aspire to provocation and achieve it. It generated substantial controversy about the relationship between media violence and real violence, which was itself a kind of proof of the film’s central argument: media coverage of a work about media coverage of violence generating more media coverage of violence. Roger Ebert gave it four stars. Other critics found it exhausting. The culture argued about it, which it was designed to make happen.