Actress Pandora Isaacs (Tanna Frederick of Jaglom's HOLLYWOOD DREAMS and IRENE IN TIME) and her "civilian" sister Betsy (Julie Davis, FINDING BLISS) have returned to their family home during Passover for different reasons: Pandora to lick her wounds after yet another disastrous relationship, a reluctant Betsy to introduce her "normal" fiance James (Judd Nelson, THE BREAKFAST CLUB) to her eccentric theatrical family (along with another bombshell). The attempts of the family - father George (Jack Heller, CRAWLSPACE), mother Vivian (Diane Salinger, ALICE), her brother Larry (David Proval, MEAN STREETS), and family friend Sally (lyricist Harriet Schock) - to "act" normal go out the window with Pandora's grand entrance. Betsy's own inner drama queen comes out as she tries to prevent her thoroughly captivated fiance from being seduced into the chaos that is her family's way of life.

Jaglom's films have been compared to the works of Woody Allen, and JUST 45 MINUTES FROM BROADWAY is one of his films that seems to have been similarly inspired by Ingmar Bergman's chamber films with its handful of characters coming together at a country house or cottage and reflecting on the choices they made in their lives. The script is depicts the lives of actors as liberating but full of both professional and personal heartache, and also looks at the extent to which the normal lives of "civilians" are also performances. Dedicated to actors and actresses "and the families who refused to disown them", Henry Jaglom's JUST 45 MINUTES FROM BROADWAY takes a while to get started but it ultimately makes for a very charming drama. The project began as a stage play featuring the principal actors (except for Nelson) that played for nine months in Los Angeles, and filmed excerpts from a live stage performance bookend the film. These sequences take a highly mobile approach to encompass all of the movements of the actors and the nuances of their performances and it's a little disorienting; but the film proper's more conventional coverage then takes on a strangely theatrical feel (particularly the climax where the front porch and driveway of the house almost feels like a stage as it encompasses all of the action). Nelson at first seems out of his depth surrounded by stage actors, but his hesitant "odd man out" is actually quite appropriate as his character comes to certain realizations about himself; however, Davis and Frederick are both captivating from the start, and Proval's performance will surprise viewers only familiar with him from THE SOPRANOS. Jaglom's older brother Michael Emil (the star of his earlier films SITTING DUCKS and CAN SHE BAKE A CHERRY PIE? and usual supporting actor in his later films) appears here as George's uncle during the Passover Seder dinner.