Movies set primarily in bars

– Barfly: Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway are what the title says.

– Trees Lounge: Steve Buscemi hangs around the titular tin-ashtray joint.

– Cocktail: Tom Cruise tends bar.

– The Lost Weekend: Ray Milland is either at Nat’s Bar or drinking alone in his apartment.

Any others? They can have scenes outside bars; all four of these do, of course. But I’m looking for movies where the main character working in or hanging around in a bar is what drives the story.

(Not 54 or Last Days of Disco, or anything set in a nightclub. And not movies about alcoholics who do most of their drinking in a house or an alleyway. Just movies set in bars.)

My favourite movie set in a bar is The Drop.

From a Dennis Lehane short story, Animal Rescue, it stars Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and was James Gandolfini’s final film. Considering that Lehane wrote Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and several episodes of The Wire you can tell it isn’t Cheers.

Coyote Ugly
Roadhouse
St. Elmo’s Fire
Lost in Translation
Does Rick’s Café Américain count? Rick seems to think so: " Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine"

From Dusk Till Dawn - titty bars are still bars, no?

My Blueberry Nights

It’s not most people’s idea of a “bar movie”, but all of the 1973 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s the Iceman Cometh takes place in a bar.

The film is just one minute shy of an astonishing four hours long.

It had two intermissions.

St. Elmo’s Fire was set mostly in a bar?

A pretty good chunk of Goodfellas takes place in various bars and private clubs.

A lot of it - it’s where Emilio Estevez’s character worked and the rest of them hung out, IIRC.

Plus, you know, the movie title comes from the bar, which has to carry some weight…

Shaun of the Dead’s major plot revolves around getting to a pub, and the last third of the movie is set there.

Seems to me that a lot of Ironweed’s scenes were in a bar, but it’s been a long time since I saw the film.

I wouldn’t say it was set primarily in a bar, but a lot of the time spent in Sunshine on Leith is in a Scottish Pub.

Honorable mention for Running Scared. About half the movie (IIRC) takes place in a bar and the lead cops want to own a bar when they retire.

The World’s End, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s third movie in their “Cornetto Trilogy”*, is set in a succession of bars, including the titular “World’s End”. Not as good as the other two in the series (Shaun of the Dead, mentioned above, and Hot Fuzz)

Does Urban Cowboy count? I don’t know if I’d call Gilley’s a nightclub.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Every Which Way But Loose, but doesn’t Clint Eastwood spend most of his time in bars doing bar fights?

I rewatched EWWBL a couple of years ago. Yes, there’s a significant amount of time spent in bars and nightclubs, due to the fights, as well as Philo (Eastwood) pursuing a relationship with a country singer (played by Sondra Locke). But, if memory serves, the time in bars is still a minority of the total film.

Harvey. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched it, but Wikipedia confirms my recollection that Elwood P. Dowd and his 6-foot invisible rabbit friend spend most of their time in a bar.

A lot of Predestination, a pretty good adaptation of Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies,” takes places in a dingy bar as one character talks to another. Turns out they have 'way more in common than one of them realizes.

I would guess Ironweed, though I’ve never seen it.

See post 10.

I like that movie a lot.

Another one I like is Hi-Life – the one from 1998. It’s not a great movie, but I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.