The Sixties dream is shattered, broken fragments lying around. Paranoia hangs in the air like a pall. All around are bent people -- drug dealers, burnouts, idiotic yuppies, crooked cops and their henchmen. The hippie dream is way, way over. This is the Vietnam War-era backdrop for Who'll Stop the Rain.

Through this corrupt landscape storms Ray Hicks, a merchant marine sailor who reads Nietzsche, a force of nature who takes shit from no one, who can assemble an M-16 with his eyes closed, who has underworld connections and has a hideout in the mountains of southern California. Hicks is brought brilliantly to life by Nick Nolte in the performance of his career as well as one of the most charismatic performances in any movie from the Seventies.

Hicks has some problems. A drug deal foisted on to him by his feckless pal Converse, played to jittery perfection by Michael Moriarity, has gone all sideways. A big bag of pure heroin procured in Saigon is to be sold in the U.S. It's a set-up, and Converse and Hicks are being played for patsies by a corrupt cop named Anthiel, a snake played by the criminally underused Anthony Zerbe.

Hicks escapes the trap and is soon on the run with the heroin, an M-16 and Converse's morose and drug-addicted wife Marge, played woozily by Tuesday Weld, all in tow.

Big chunks of highly charged but often funny dialogue are lifted straight from Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers, on which the movie is based. And nobody writes dialogue like Stone.

It all leads to a wild night-time gunfight on a mountainside while Hank Snow's "Golden Rocket" screams away on the soundtrack. Nolte's final march down the railroad tracks will most definitely bring a lump to your throat.

Converse's last line is just perfect. No indeed, the Sixties are over and this cannot go on.

One hell of a movie.