PERSONALITY CRISIS: ONE NIGHT ONLY — NYFF 2022

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David Johansen's swan song (70th birthday) performance of tunes from his rich musical history serves as the centerpiece for this loving documentary.

Co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, the film seamlessly draws from Johansen's two performances at the storied uptown Café Carlyle in January of 2020, before Covid pulled the plug on the World.

Johansen's tight-knit four piece "Boys in the Band Band" plays every note for keeps.

Taste baby, you've got taste.

Johansen's flawless phrasing is worth the price of admission alone.

This bad cat is a singer's singer.

Especially entertaining is Johansen's Gene Krupa-inspired drummer stealing scenes like a cat daddy on the prowl. Wild hair flying with plenty of school boy mugging. 

Between songs, Johansen tells hilarious tales out of school, about such pivotable life experiences as befriending director Milos Foreman at the Chelsea Hotel while angling for a role in Foreman's then upcoming film musical "Hair."

Blondie's Debbie Harry soaks up the limelight from her place in the audience.

The overall effect is enthralling, if bittersweet.

Classic and rare footage of The New York Dolls veer into clips of Johansen's solo career, that gave way to his lounge lizard alter ego Buster Poindexter — think "Hot Hot Hot," or better yet, "Frenchette."

"I been to France, so let's just dance."

You'd be hard pressed to find a musician with more personal integrity than David Johansen. 

You can't help but feel some sorrow at the prospect of losing the last New York Doll standing.

"Personality Crisis: One Night Only" is indeed, as Johansen put it at the New York Film Festival post screening Q&A, "a beautiful object."

Ovations are in order. 

Not Rated. 127 mins.

JOAN DIDION: THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD — NYFF 55

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Griffin Dunne’s elegant documentary about his aunt, celebrated author Joan Didion, presents an intimate portrait of the tragic literary figure but doesn’t always satisfactorily communicate the emotional, thematic, and political takeaways of her writings.

We get that Didion saw through the Central Park Jogger case for the gigantic lie that it was right from the start. Footage of ever tone-deaf political figures Donald Trump and Ed Koch show the idiot side of a coin that should never be turned over from the intellectual rigor that Didion represents for humanity.

Didion foresaw Dick Cheney and the Bush brigade for the war criminals they would become via a doublespeak of “professional insiders attuned to a pitch beyond the range of normal hearing.”

However, the film glosses over Didion’s coverage of the war in El Salvador — revealed in her book-length essay. Yes, El Salvador was the most dangerous place Joan Didion ever hoped to be, but we don’t get the gist of her essay or the opportunity to digest her editorial voice from the horrors she witnessed while there.    

The documentary isn’t as polished as it could be. A lack of chyrons makes identifying interview subjects, such as New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, difficult. What the viewer does get is a sense of Joan Didion, the person, as a fearless and fierce force-of-nature who could walk into a room occupied by hippies in San Francisco where a five-year-old girl was tripping on acid, and amorally view the incident as “pure gold” from a writer’s perspective.

At 82, the waifish Joan Didion expresses herself with dramatic hand gestures that emphasize her thoughts and ideas with indelible articulation. Her poise is flawless. She’s Jackie O, Anna Wintour, and Susan Sontag rolled into one. When President Obama expresses surprise over the fact that Joan Didion had not previously received the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal during the 2013 ceremony, it puts a fine point on how Joan Didion should have received the award before she was so frail. The center has not held, but Joan Didion is still with us as of this writing. Cheers to that.   

Not Rated. 94 mins. 

WONDERSTRUCK — NYFF 55

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As I watched Todd Haynes’s latest film I kept asking myself, who is this movie for? It is not a children’s movie even though the story is split between the journeys of two preteens 50 years apart.

The nostalgic tale doesn’t seem to tilted toward adult audiences unlikely to recognized themselves in the bi-polar storyline. Everything about this film is a disappointment. It is, by far, Todd Haynes’s weakest effort to date.

"Wonderstruck" is based on the 2011 novel of the same name by author and illustrator Brian Selznick, who also authored the film’s screenplay.

Rose (Millicent Simmonds) is a 12-year-old deaf runaway on the mean streets of New York City circa 1927. Still Rose’s expression never wavers from that of a satisfied Cheshire cat. She seems emotionally and intellectually vapid.

Rose wants to meet her silver screen idol Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore), who she watches in a silent film entitled “Daughter of the Storm.” Haynes sets Rose’s half of the film as a black-and-white silent movie in contrast to that of Ben (Oakes Fegley), a boy in search of his missing father. As it turns out, even Ben’s mother Elaine (Michelle Williams) is gone from his life. All Ben has to show for his familial history is a bookmark from “Kincaid Books,” a New York City bookstore. On the back of the bookmark is written, “Elaine, I’ll wait for you. Love, Danny.”

So, what seems to be a not-so romantic mystery dissolves into a puddle of unearned sentimentality. The film’s overwrought production design is fussy to distraction. There isn’t enough narrative substance to withstand the overwrought time periods on display. It’s easy to blame the bland source material for this film’s complete and utter failure, but a burning question remains about why the filmmaker behind such instant classic works as “Far From Heaven” and “I’m Not There” would go down such an obvious rabbit hole.

Rated PG. 117 mins.