The Safdie brothers populate their films with unlikely characters, village idiosyncrasies plucked from the wild and set loose upon the script. Many of them are scruffy, rough around the edges. Wayne Diamond is a dreamer and a romantic with big ambitions—shortly before I arrived, he tells me, he got a text from Sebastian Bear-McClard, the Uncut Gems producer who first introduced the Safdies to Wayne Diamond. “He wrote me…. What the fuck did he write me?” Wayne Diamond paws at his phone. “Here: ‘I’m going to change your life.’”

Is Wayne Diamond going to change mine? As our 45 minutes together stretch into nearly two hours, Wayne Diamond’s anachronistic musings slowly give way to something deeply, poetically humane. Eventually. “I think people look like slobs,” he tells me. “They don’t look good.” Men, he says, “are really sleazy today. They got their porn, they all jerk off all day long, and they don’t even have babies as much anymore.”

“Can you tell that in the way that they’re dressing?” I ask.

His publicist—an addition to the squad since his newfound movie stardom, along with two social media managers who curate a bombastically earnest Instagram account—clarifies that it’s “athleisure” he’s referring to. “Yeah, right,” he nods. “That’s disgusting.”

He continues, “First of all, I think chino pants should be outlawed in every restaurant in New York. Striped shirts and checked shirts. They should throw you out of a restaurant.” Once Wayne Diamond is off on his theory about the decline and clothes and the rise of porn—his own hemline index, if you will—it’s basically impossible to stop him. Everything moves but his hair. (Wayne Diamond says he generally does his own hair—“I get the right gel, I get the right thing, the hairspray, I hold it up, it's a whole trip to watch me do it"—though he sometimes goes to “1400 Broadway,” a place, I later find on google, called “Made Man Barber.”)

And porn has totally screwed men up: “It’s a really fucked up world we’re living in. Not morally,” he clarifies, but people “don’t get excited about the same things anymore.” Like, “when they were into art or something, they went to a museum, and they saw these [nude] women and they way they used to look, maybe they would get a better idea about life. I don’t think people read anymore, either, which is another problem.” When he was young, you had to find other ways to get off: “Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, every guy in the world jerked off to that, but at least you read a good book!”

“We have a cultural problem in America,” he continues. “We don’t have much culture, and what we have is really not much. When you go to Europe, everybody’s dressed up in a nice jacket going out to dinner, nice jewelry, very classy. Good shoes, everything shines, looking spiffy.”

Enough complaining, I say. What are two or three things a man can do to improve himself? This seems to be something Wayne Diamond has thought a lot about. “The first thing a guy has got to do is look in a mirror at himself. And say, ‘What could I do to make myself look better?’ Even if a guy's ugly. ‘What can I do?’ That's the first thing. Just look at your body and look at your face and say, ‘What can I do with my body and face?’ Get nude in front of the mirror, he says, and ask yourself, ‘How do I cover the fat? How do I do this, how do I make myself look better?’”