Nuts was the final film for veteran actors Karl Malden and Robert Webber; the movie also featured Leslie Nielsen in his last non-comedic role.

When call girl Claudia Draper kills client Allen Green in self-defense, her mother Rose and stepfather Arthur Kirk attempt to have her declared mentally incompetent by Dr. Herbert Morrison in order to avoid a public scandal.

Levinsky begins to probe her background to determine how the child of supposedly model upper middle class parents could find herself in this situation, and with each piece of her past he uncovers, he receives additional, disturbing insight into what brought Claudia to this crossroads in her life.

Barbra Streisand had campaigned for the role, but filming was scheduled to begin in the summer of 1982 and Rydell was unwilling to postpone the project while she completed Yentl.

[2] Universal was concerned about the controversial nature of Nuts and eventually sold the property to Warner Bros., where it remained in limbo until 1986, when Streisand was signed for $5 million plus a percentage of the gross.

She researched her role by studying schizophrenic patients in a mental ward and interviewing prostitutes at a Los Angeles brothel, and she began writing her own draft of the screenplay.

She refused to promote it other than a three-part interview with Gene Shalit on The Today Show, but she later participated in a press conference when the film was released in foreign markets.

A group of three screenwriters...have not succeeded in giving it any momentum at all...The material is exceptionally talky and becalmed, the central question none too compelling, and the visual style distractingly cluttered...Still, Miss Streisand...manages to be every inch the star.

"[8] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film two out of four stars and noted that "the movie's revelations are told in such dreary, clichéd, weather-beaten old movie terms that we hardly care...As the courtroom drama slogs its weary way home, Streisand's authentic performance as a madwoman seems harder and harder to sustain...Nuts is essentially just a futile exercise in courtroom cliches, surrounding a good performance that doesn't fit.

"[9] Rita Kempley of The Washington Post called the film "a consistent character study, paced like a good thriller" and cited Barbra Streisand's "bravissimo performance".

She added "She is so dazzling, in fact, that she blinds us to the pat psychology of the facile script...There's heat in the moment, but there's nothing to chew on afterward...Nuts is less than the sum of its illustrious parts.

"[11] Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote "While the movie holds one's attention throughout, and its liberal message is compelling, we are clued in to certain facts about the heroine so early on that the audience is never really tested along with the characters.