Tag: Culture Kaleidoscope

One of the most insightful movies ever made about movies, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) had former silent film star Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a turbaned gargoyle looking back on the old days and becoming increasingly psychotic as she realizes they’re not coming back. Younger man William Holden played struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis, who, against his better judgment, moves in with Norma and ends up her prey — dead in her pool, from where he tells us this tale of Hollywood dreams run amok. (Yes, the film is narrated by a corpse. It’s a macabre meditation on fame, mass fickleness, and dementia.)

In 1994, Broadway got the musical version, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, The Phantom of the Opera) and book and lyrics by Don Black (Aspects of Love) and Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). Something was lost in the translation from cinema-about-cinema; the songs humanized Norma in a way that fleshed her out but took away from her diva-esque fascination. Glenn Close, though, was superb in the role, able to repel and demand pity in the same phrase, and the show exuded lilting melodies and a mordant appeal.

And now it’s back, in a revised production directed by Jamie Lloyd (Betrayal, A Doll’s House) and abbreviated to Sunset Blvd. Gone are the mansion and other trappings — the set by Soutra Gilmour is just black murkiness and a shimmery curtain. (The sun has already set on this Blvd.) The actors — clad in black, with flashes of white — tend to do representational line readings, looking out at the audience as much as they look at each other. Most importantly, Nicole Scherzinger — who was the lead singer of the strutting neo-burlesque girl group Pussycat Dolls — is Norma Desmond, clad in what looks like a black Victoria’s Secret negligee, making a sexier, less oddball Norma than those of the past.

This production was an award-winning sensation in London, but so was the overwrought current Broadway revival of Cabaret, so I had my doubts. But while Blvd. is a weird mix of the stunning and the dull, there’s enough of the former to give new life to the material, certainly more than Norma’s career ever gets. When she’s not being made to strike cliched arm gestures, Scherzinger is fabulous, full of sarcasm and vinegar. She first appears via a pulsating modern dance routine, moving like an epileptic centipede, then settles into Norma’s alternating narcissism (“We inspired new ways to dream!”) and manipulations (“You can’t possibly think of leaving now, Joe”), eventually growing into a full-scale Hollywood monster.

Scherzinger’s bold performance should make for gleeful gay bar conversation for years to come. When the audience cheers her two big numbers, you can sense the diva hunger she’s fulfilling.

The belty ballad “With One Look” has the big-lunged Scherzinger rhapsodizing about the power of sincere acting — specifically, hers. (“With one smile / I’m the girl next door / Or the love that you’ve hungered for”). She’s even more effective when Norma returns to Paramount Studios — pretty much respected, but unwanted — for a deeply felt “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” her desperation threatening to make her sympathetic. (“I don’t want to be alone / That’s all in the past / The world’s waited long enough / I’ve come home at last.”) Scherzinger lives the song moment-to-moment in thrilling fashion, and it helps that we’ve already been set up to feel softer about this off-putting creature. Asked if they should just shoo the woman away, studio head Cecil B. DeMille (Shavey Brown) soberly remarks, “Thirty million fans have given her the brush. Isn’t that enough?”

Otherwise, the show features a lot of recitative-style singing and very little dialogue — it’s really an opera — and falters when Norma is not center stage, though the supporting players manage to score amidst the smoke effects. David Thaxton is her devoted servant Max von Mayerling (“You are the greatest star of all!”), who’s harboring a secret that ends up sending chills, as in the film. And Tom Francis is expert as Gillis, especially in the entr’acte, which consists of a live video of him, beginning in his dressing room where he happens to be watching the movie version of Sunset Boulevard. Francis then passes by his castmates — including Thaxton, looking at a photo of the Pussycat Dolls — and a cutout of Andrew Lloyd Webber, only to end up on the street, where he keeps singing amidst real-life Times Square activity. The fourth wall breaking (the video design is by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, with this particular tracking shot done by ensemble member Shayna McPherson) makes clear that this is an evening about theater and putting on a show as much as it is about Norma’s desire to get on camera again — though of course, videos are just another form of moviemaking. Throwing just about anything into the mix — Norma’s beloved dead monkey even ends up alive and part of the street bustle — underlines the fact that director Lloyd will try just about anything for effect.

The show’s palette makes it feel like an old black and white movie — set in no particular time — and the large video closeups of the cast throughout the performance readily transport you to Norma’s image-obsessed mindset (“We had faces then!”). By the end the whole thing has become a horror movie, thanks to a drawn-out end sequence that leaves Norma’s nightie covered in blood and audience members either shaken or relieved. But the truth is, Scherzinger’s bold performance should make for gleeful gay bar conversation for years to come. When the audience cheers her two big numbers, you can sense the diva hunger she’s fulfilling for the Broadway crowd, who are anxious to have this icon back, and in a revelatory way. 

For those who are wondering if Sunset Blvd. has made a comeback, one need only remember Norma’s comment about herself: “I hate that word. It’s a return.” ❖

Sunset Blvd.
St. James Theater
246 West 44th Street

Michael Musto has written for the Voice since 1984, best known for his outspoken column “La Dolce Musto.” He has penned four books and is streaming in docs on Netflix, Hulu, Vice, and Showtime.

How do you sell the presidency to voters? New York–based artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese have posed this question for decades, compiling footage from more than 70 years of American political ads to create Political Advertisement X: 1952–2024. Updated every four years since 1984, the film presents black and white clips beginning with the conformist Eisenhower era through Lyndon Johnson’s apocalyptic ’60s (Mad Ave’s “Daisy Girl” plucking petals off a flower in a countdown to nuclear Armageddon), then into the made-for-TV Reagan years (the Gipper’s feel-good “Morning in America” campaign) and the Twitter-amplified fake news that tainted 2020’s presidential election (Trump’s fearmongering “Stop Joe Biden and His Rioters” commercial), right up to our current fact-free and wildly uncertain 2024. 

Muntadas and Reese’s electoral videos are queued in chronological order, with no explanatory voiceover — the better to activate viewers’ tangled noodles, too many of which remain, astoundingly, at loose ends. The film’s results are by turns maudlin, maddening, mendacious, absurd, alarming, and downright frightening, as consecutive ads play with greater and greater brazenness on the nation’s fears and prejudices, like an old school air raid siren.  For more than 90 minutes, the artists let the commercials’ own words and images expose the sloshing toxic miasma between America’s growing electoral falsehoods and shrinking truths, specifically those surrounding U.S. presidential candidates past and present — while painting an unsettling portrait of the hyper-surreality that increasingly characterizes modern-day politics.

Courtesy Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese

On Tuesday, October 22, 2024, Muntadas and Reese will premiere the 11th version of their four-decade collaboration. The venue: Cooper Union’s Great Hall, to be followed by a conversation with Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC’s Peabody Award–winning podcast On the Media. The film, set to screen nationally, was due to play at the USF Contemporary Art Museum, in Tampa, Florida (which I happen to helm curatorially), until hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated the area. Spuriously, Governor Ron DeSantis continues to deny that these disasters are linked to climate change — in case you need reminding of the stakes.  ❖

Christian Viveros-Fauné has covered art and its intersections with politics for the Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years.

Political Advertisement X: 1952–2024
Screening and panel, Tuesday, October 22, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Cooper Union, The Great Hall (Foundation Building)
7 East 7th Street (between Third and Fourth avenues)

We lucky New Yorkers get a boost in stretching out those last days of perhaps the most fun season (barring wildfires, floods, etc.) from SummerStage, in Central Park. This year, the festival aimed to highlight “forward-thinking women pushing boundaries.” Last Thursday night, with opener Yasmin Williams and headliner Brittany Howard — a thoughtful Michael Kiwanuka right in sync between them — boundaries were completely making a run for it. (Even the stage, under a “tent” that looked like a UFO, refused to be stereotyped.)

I hadn’t heard of Williams, a 27-year-old guitarist who both fingerpicks and taps on the strings. She told the audience that she developed her method of percussive playing — with her instrument lying on her lap — after excelling on Guitar Hero II as a kid; that position for the controller increased her speed. From her first crystalline phrases on “Cliffwalk,” which begins her new album, Acadia, it was clear she had retained and refined that rapidity, all in the service of beautiful, even meditative melody. On “Hummingbird,” she played as though her fingers were those tiny birds urgently needing to get to the next alluring flower, and with “Juvenescence” she created a waterfall of gorgeous sound. She dexterously played both guitar and kalimba for “Guitka,” but saved the big finish for her virtuosic “Restless Heart,” her hands decisively coming down at the end — as though making musical exclamation points — on those evocative strings.

Williams left us on a lovely high, but we were about to experience two seasoned artists who do not shy away from pain — individual and global — in their work. In 2017, Kiwanuka’s despairing “Cold Little Heart” (the heart in question is the singer’s own) became the theme song for the TV series Big Little Lies. At the time I assumed it was an overlooked but classic R&B track from the ’60s. That haunting, sensuous song transformed a then 29-year-old singer-songwriter, largely unknown outside his native England, into a star. 

We could see the amalgam that Howard has become: somehow keeping that rawness, even as she has taken on a kind of elegance. 

And so as the evening darkened, the peoplescape, from my bleachers’ vantage point, changed from reclining figures on blankets to a sea of heads all the way to the stage. To cheers and applause, Kiwanuka walked out from the wings in a loose whitish suit, immediately getting down to business with “Lowdown (part i)” in that soulful, sometimes raspy voice: “Make my way through the night / To the so-called jubilee.” The audience was now in a jubilee of feeling — the sea of heads swayed as though creating waves — his music not just giving us something but pulling something from us as well, as the best songs do. With an eight-piece band behind him and his piercing guitar, Kiwanuka went on to perform such songs as “Hero,” with an almost scary shuddering percussive break midway, befitting its subject of racist murders; the naked plea for help “Rule the World,” with an electrifying turn from backup singer Emily Holligan; and, of course, “Cold Little Heart,” its intro background “oooh”s taking us into swooning territory. Throughout the set intriguing images appeared on a large screen behind the group, beginning with a baby’s face, perhaps messaging the title of Kiwanuka’s forthcoming album, Small Changes. He closed with the tormented yet defiant “Love & Hate,” which echoed “Cold Little Heart” in subtle piano riffs but featured a screaming electric guitar. It felt like a cathartic ending: “Calling all the people here to see the show / Calling for my demons now to let me go,” Kiwanuka sang.

He had already told us, “I love this city. New York is a special place.”

It was about to get even more special. As with Kiwanuka, I was stunned by Brittany Howard when I first heard her. With the song “Hold On,” from 2012, she blew in like a southern hurricane, a force of nature barely able to contain her power. She put the shake in her band Alabama Shakes and shook out any preconceived idea of how a frontwoman should look or sound. More recently, with the band now on indefinite hiatus, she’s released two solo albums, Jaime and the recent, genre-bending What Now.

When she took the stage on Thursday, amid color-changing, streaking lights and clouds of smoke, Howard, wearing a shimmering caftan, began in Ella Fitzgerald–esque tones with a song from the new album called “I Don’t,” but her voice grew more intense as soon as she strapped on a guitar. In the songs that followed, we could see the amalgam, so to speak, that Howard has become: somehow keeping that rawness, even as she has taken on a kind of elegance. At any moment, a dulcet high note could give way to a searing growl or a cut-off howl — as it did when she performed “Baby” (after asking us, “How many of y’all are brokenhearted right now?” Judging by the reaction, quite a few). In “Another Day,” she prowled the stage, taking along her two black-clad backup singers while clapping, dancing, throwing up her hands, and snarling like a cat; she urged amity in these rough times: “If we can get this shit together / Then what could we make?” And she literally preached in a spoken-word piece ending with an insistent “We’re all brothers and sisters!” Everything came to a head in her frenzied rendition of Nina Simone’s 1969 answer to the Beatles’ “Revolution.” (Simone found John Lennon’s lyrics about activism too negative, revamping with such lines as “Some folks are gonna get the notion / I know they’ll say I’m preachin’ hate / But if I have to swim the ocean / Well I will just to communicate.”)

At that point, if Howard had climbed into the UFO, I for one would have followed her. 

But we still needed to hear the Prince-like “Power to Undo” and the ultra-rhythmic “What Now,” with its irresistible repeated line “I ain’t sorry.” And Howard couldn’t leave without a nod to the festival: For an encore, she and her seven-piece band performed a revelatory cover of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze,” with a syncopated guitar wafting it along and Howard letting her voice soar into the stratosphere. ❖

Mary Lyn Maiscott has written about music for Vanity Fair and other publications. An NYC-based singer-songwriter, she has a new song, “Jezebel,” with the lyric “Dance to Kiwanuka in the pale moonlight,” out as a digital single October 10.

A contemporary film reviewer’s most brutal challenge: taking on an origin-story biopic about him — He Who Shall Not Be Named — four weeks before Election Day 2024 and attempting to retain some semblance of objectivity (what?) or critical responsibility (oof) or at least rhetorical savoir-faire in the process. Let’s not kid ourselves: It’s an invitation to throw hands. Trying, this month, to look at Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice as a movie instead of a sign of something very wrong with the universe is a fool’s effort — not at all unlike the last nine years of punditry trying to grok whatever fuels the current GOP candidate’s persistent popularity. Some movies must be shunned not for what they are but for the reality they endeavor to reflect.

In the end of course it’s just a movie, and so, right now, something of a footnote — the news cycle will, sorry, trump it. In November, either the forces of workaday reason and base-level bullshit detection will have triumphed, or the orcs will have taken the castle, again. Either way, Abbasi’s little film is a soon-to-be-forgotten pixel in the larger scenario. Maybe in a few years, when the stakes are lower and the bruises have faded, you might take a look and say, Huh, not bad. But not now.

The film’s strenuous effort at being “fair and balanced” is nonsense: Our protagonist is practically a Dickens foundling, a wide-eyed, egoless blank slate, vulnerable to Cohn’s witchy ways.

But OK, let’s do the job, as if it matters. It’s the ’70s, and fresh-faced Daddy’s boy Donald (Sebastian Shaw) is an up-and-coming NYC real estate mogul blessed with the nasty good fortune of crossing paths with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who was a famously amoral, comic-book-villain mega-lawyer who graduated from being Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare junkyard dog to becoming a mover and shaker in city politics, even as he lived a wildly profligate gay-orgy lifestyle. From Cohn, Donald learns criminal stuff like blackmail and secret surveillance, and hears all kinds of rules: Never accept defeat, “Truth is malleable,” and so on. In other words, the same evil crap we’ve been hearing since 2015, three decades after Cohn died. 

Cohn’s legacy lives on, and may ruin things yet. But in the film, we get to see Little Donald Fauntleroy make his first deals, back in the day, getting a taste of municipal skullduggery and learning how to be a mini-Cohn, which he does successfully enough to eventually turn around and be a douche to Cohn in the ’80s, when the poor little ogre was dying of AIDS.

If this sounds like something you’d only sit through this month if your eyelids were clamped open, à la A Clockwork Orange, then you’re in good company. But since I did, I should say that the film’s strenuous effort at being “fair and balanced” is nonsense: Our protagonist is practically a Dickens foundling, a wide-eyed, egoless blank slate, vulnerable to Cohn’s witchy ways. It’s hard to imagine being an adult over the past nine years and coming away wanting to portray the guy, in his late 20s, early 30s, as some kind of guileless, arrested-development teenager ready to be instructed in the black arts of being a professional scumbag — as though it was all Cohn’s fault. If you’d been reading Wayne Barrett’s reporting on the man in the Voice at the time, you’d be smelling four-day-old fish, but even a minute’s worth of exposure anytime during 2024 would call the movie’s cards for you. 

What were they thinking? The screenplay, by journalist and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman, also pounds home the idea that Cohn was the way he was because of an ardent, take-no-prisoners patriotism — “You have to be willing to do anything to safeguard America!” he says, showing Our Hero his basement library of extortion-ready recordings. What this has to do with strong-arming the city council to build hotels is left unexplained, and anyway, it all sounds way too much like a neo-fascist stump speech today. It doesn’t help things that Strong’s snake-like Cohn is a powerfully convincing monstrosity and you can imagine a nitwitted viewer taking his warped reasoning as read. Only a foreign filmmaker — Abbasi is Persian-Dutch — could have swallowed that whopper and thought either man was a misguided, flag-waving ideologue and not the world-class miscreants they were and are.

Oh yeah, there’s the whole “subplot” about Ivana (Maria Bakalova). It should also be said that Abbasi, whose rather terrific earlier movies include Border (2018) and Holy Spider (2022), brings a nice period grit to what is, ultimately, a banal and formulaic biopic trifle, complete with unremarkable historical cameos (Warhol, Steinbrenner, Roger Stone, etc.). Whatever this thing is to be taken for, it’s not Abbasi’s fault — though you can’t help but suspect it’ll be a circumstantial sinkhole from which his career will have to climb. 

We could’ve warned him. Reportedly, the ex-prez in question tried to get the film scotched after its festival premieres — not surprising, given the arterial spray of dumb invective we routinely endure from him. But go ahead and try to pin down exactly what pissed him off (if it wasn’t the late-coming stomach-staple and scalp-reduction surgeries, in loving close-up). All told, the film’s a rather soft headshot of the worst American alive. The small distributor, Briarcliff, has clarified their position by subtitling Abbasi’s movie, on the poster, “An American Horror Story.” Settle down. That’s not the film, but it could be what we get for real.  ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

A bro-comedy director, a Method-y actor, and a pop star walk into a bar — and that’s as close to a joke as you’ll get with Joker: Folie à Deux, the inevitable sequel/event du jour, released within five weeks of an election in which the most evil-clownish of American electees seeks to re-enter the presidency and turn the federal system into scorched earth. Coincidence? Released in the middle of That Guy’s first term, Joker (2019) seemed, in its torrent of discomfort, to be expressing a nihilistic and self-pitying anger uncannily personified by the whining president of the day; like him, Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck was a spuming spectacle of emotional toxicity. Enough consumers seemed to empathize with both to make some of us fantasize about time travel — back to 1966, say, when Lyndon Johnson was pressing federal indictments on the Klan and Cesar Romero played the Joker, cartoonishly, on TV.

The new movie’s participation in our cultural now-ness might not be as noticeable — it is, for one thing, something of a repetitious drag. It’s not all for lack of effort: While director Todd Phillips’s first Joker performed the unlikely feat of converting yet another comic-book backstory sequel into an Oscar-winning reconstitution of the Martin Scorsese ’70s, and Taxi Driver in particular, the inevitable sequel looks to be the new New York, New York — sort of. (There remain plenty of reasons why remaking Scorsese’s sour 1977 musical would not have been a great idea.) Much more of a deliberately old-timey songfest and a patience-testing courtroom drama than an episode in any DC-verse franchise strategy, Phillips’s headlong psychodrama seems destined to frustrate the fanboys who found themselves wicking to the first film’s edge-of-violence anarchy.

We’ll see. There’s reason to be cynical about this two-step project — the first film, because it took itself so seriously, couldn’t quite be dismissed as just comic-book dross, but it could very well be dismissed for other things, including the filmmakers playing loose and stupid with the realities of mental illness. That hasn’t changed; I’m still looking forward to a damning address in the APA’s Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. We start with a rather on-the-nose introductory fake Looney Tunes cartoon, in which the Joker battles for supremacy with his own shadow, then we land in Arkham Asylum, where Phoenix’s emaciated bad boy is a narcotized zombie, taunted by guards (including Brendan Gleeson) and awaiting his competency trial. As is de rigueur for this world, the color palette stretches from green mold to brown mold. (And I never appreciated the co-optation of Arkham by the DC-verse, which has shit-all to do with Lovecraft.) Bearing a visage that could have made him a German Expressionist star in the ’20s, a great Renfield to Max Schreck’s Orlock, Phoenix is nevertheless out-acted by his own alarmingly protrusive scapulas.

In a Gotham full of clown masks and police brutality, the Joker remains some kind of anarchist cult hero.

Anything could happen, you’d think, but the screenplay, by Phillips and Scott Silver, decides to keep the characters running in place. Arthur jolts a bit from his waking coma after spotting Lee (Lady Gaga), a pyro patient in another ward to which Arthur, being a now-docile mass murderer, is allowed to go. They’re soulmates from the first glance, apparently, and the next two hours are divided more or less evenly between story contrivances so the two can be alone together, the intrusive dreamtime musical numbers, and the murder trial (Arthur is deemed competent after all). A strange stasis falls over the film — there are skirmishes and conflagrations and erratic peaks and valleys in Arthur’s Joker-y sense of empowerment, but we always end up back where we started. In fact, most of the story entails recalling and rehashing the events of the first film, over and over again, as if it were Hamlet or something. The earlier killings are never disputed, just reiterated in a confused debate, in and out of the naturally unconvincing trial scenes, about Arthur’s being responsible for himself or not, because of the traumatic scars from his miserable life.

Miserable it is, but what little forward propulsion the movie has vanishes when Arthur turns a homicidal-fantasy corner, fires his lawyer (a beleaguered Catherine Keener), and decides to act as his own attorney, in full clown makeup. This doesn’t go well, for him or us, stalling the film further in unfunny courtroom stunts and confrontations, running the clock down, as it were. That is, until the what-the-fuck-ness of it is interrupted by a “Holy deux ex machina Batman” kaboom that explicitly and cheaply echoes the streets of downtown on 9/11, and made me want to puke.

The songs, you should be warned, are nearly all old show tunes and Top 40 standards, from MGM musicals of the ’50s to Burt Bacharach to Stevie Wonder, breathily warbled by Gaga and tunelessly rasped by Phoenix. Every musical number stops the story and overemphasizes some simple narrative moment. (We get “That’s Entertainment!” three times, once in a clip from 1953’s The Band Wagon.) The two main characters’ overactive fantasy life is, in fact, the film’s primary postulate — the battle between reality and showbiz fantasy (usually depicted as cheesy ’70s TV shows) is waged, often rhetorically, in virtually every scene, but what exactly Phillips et al. are accusing 20th-century pop culture of is far from clear. On the stand, a psychiatrist opines that Arthur’s illness is “just performance”; later, during his piteous closing monologue to the jury, the judge (Bill Smitrovich) tells the clown, “You are not on a stage.” Back and forth it goes, repeating the same essentially empty question, ad infinitum.

That is, when the two protagonists are not making such a big deal about smoking cigarettes you’d think they were mainlining chocolate ketamine. All the same, you can’t deny that Phoenix has built something unforgettable here, over two overlong films: an electrocuted portrait of flailing, self-aware anguish. But he’s done it grindingly, repetitively, like he was working a 12-hour shift beheading chickens. Meanwhile, outside in a Gotham full of clown masks and police brutality, the Joker remains some kind of anarchist cult hero, which is as dumb and confounding, if not deliberately so, as the persistent blight of Trumperism in our social water table right now, like lead in the blood. 

But what if, in the end, that’s the corollary the filmmakers are reaching for? It’d be hard to swallow, but if so, you could walk away thinking that the ultimate failure of Jokerism might be, for all of the movie’s absurd dissatisfactions, a sign of hope. That would at least be something. ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

A look-at-me bid for outrageousness that fairly oozes with unironic vanity, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance does whatever it can to make news: weenie-roast Hollywood’s swinging-dick youth-lust, strip both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley down with a frequency that would make any contemporary male filmmaker nervous, go uber-gross with post-Cronenbergian body horror. It’s quite a show, if ultimately, and even predictably, light on ideas. Crucially, like any tasteless, bloodthirsty satire, Fargeat’s movie runs the risk of becoming what it’s lampooning — and Fargeat, a fundamentally unserious filmmaker who works only in the key of Too Much, eventually walks into her own line of fire. The Substance tries so hard to be vicious it ends up mocking itself, when it’s not overshooting its elephantine targets altogether.

The initial context is everything: Moore essentially plays herself, an aging ex-star on the verge of being shunted aside entirely by a patriarchal, crassly beauty-focused industry, personified by Dennis Quaid as a leering, rooster-like studio executive. You can’t help but sympathize — after the late ’90s, Hollywood essentially dropped Moore like a hot rock, at least as a bankable lead, and you can imagine that she took up Fargeat’s offer, and all of the nakedness it requires, as an act of vengeance. (She still looks great, no matter how claustrophobically close to her wrinkles the camera gets.) Moore’s bitter angst is real enough, but we quickly understand the kind of movie she’s in and we begin to fear for her, not for suffering career obsolescence in an age when actors still get leads deep into their 70s, but for needing to be subjected to roles like this, and to have her own plight as a 60-something woman in Hollywood exploited and turned into a gross joke.

You’re pelted with wet towels of messaging.

The rib-tickling begins once Moore’s beleaguered beauty gets pushed to the wall and desperately takes up an anonymous offer: the titular miracle drug, which is free (she finds it by way of mysterious phone calls, codes, and pass keys), and which has such an extravagant battery of maintenance rules that we can easily see calamity approaching like a runaway truck. The surprise is that Moore’s Elizabeth Sparkle (not kidding) isn’t rejuvenated — squishy-bloody spoiler — but instead essentially gives birth, through her spinal column, to a fresh new naked self (a dizzyingly dewy Qualley). So now there are two of her; each lies comatose (and naked) for seven days while the other is out and about, so of course during her awake time, Qualley’s Sue auditions for and lands the show her older half had been fired from.

It has to be decades since I’ve seen a movie this fixated with T&A, naked and otherwise — vast chunks of the 2-hour-and-20-minute film revel in Qualley’s exultantly naked/semi-naked youth and Moore’s naked/semi-naked relative agedness, as if Fargeat is almost daring us to call foul. Surfaces, surfaces: The relentless focus on appearances at the expense of anything else, however apt, grows tiresome. Fargeat’s overdone indulgence in flesh might’ve seemed to her to be part of the film’s point, but the eventual takeaway for us, scene by scene, is not the filmmaker’s passionate wit or nerve but her frenzied worry that we’ll be unimpressed by her effort. Which in itself ensures that we will be.

It doesn’t help that, for all her zest and energy, Fargeat gets fundamental things wrong: Every detail in her ideas of Hollywood (she’s French) feels weirdly dated, from the ’80s-style aerobics TV show both Elizabeth and Sue host to Quaid’s caricatured magnate, whose cretinous behavior feels pre-#MeToo, even pre-Weinstein. (He’s photographed, even while he’s eating, in fish-eye close-ups so awful he could use them as exhibits in a defamation lawsuit.) The dialogue is often laughably tone-deaf, every character is a cartoon save for Moore’s grave matron (even so, we never learn anything about her life), and the supposedly star-making New Year’s Eve show in the film’s climax incongruously features bare-breasted dancers. Meanwhile, you’re pelted with wet towels of messaging: When, in the first act, the card on a bouquet of flowers to Elizabeth declares “YOU WERE GREAT!,” Fargeat can’t resist cutting to a close-up of “WERE.”

The ostensibly real world Fargeat is critiquing is far less convincing even than the inevitable biophysical fuck-ups that start to snowball for Elizabeth — beginning auspiciously with a single finger that ages decades — once the drug’s rules are disobeyed. Bodily fluids of all kinds and colors gout and spew, and bodies themselves go wrong. Exhausted though you may be by the sophomoric hyperbole, this is the film’s true roller coaster, even if it does leave the story’s, and Moore’s, sexism-polluted dilemma in the dust. By the end, for better or worse (I can’t decide), you’re pretty much looking at a new Frank Henenlotter horror-burlesque, like a bigger-budget Basket Case 4. Even so, no one, I’m sure, would want to give up the rather spectacular final image, of a Hollywood Walk of Fame sidewalk star defiled by, shall we say, gasping narcissism.

Every time Elizabeth calls the drug’s secret and unhelpful helpline, it warns her, “Remember, you are one.” Not two — and if you ponder the film through the haze of crudeness and prosthetic gook, it seems far less about youth-philia, strictly speaking, or even the stridently youth- and beauty-obsessed pop culture, than about a conjectural Jekyll-Hyde combat between your stupid young vain self and the obsolete codger you’ve become. Both selves are quickly fed up with the other’s self-absorption (and housekeeping), and neither can slow the passing of days. Still, Fargeat could’ve gotten there in half the running time and a fraction of the food fight. ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

It’s a sweltering Monday afternoon when Richard Lange walks into El Compadre, a cavernous, dimly lit Mexican restaurant decorated with Christmas lights, rustic paintings, and wrought-iron chandeliers. A Hollywood staple since 1975, El Compadre is located on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard where dingy motels and strip bars rub elbows with guitar shops and nondescript galleries. It’s a perfect place to meet Lange, one of the best crime-fiction writers Los Angeles has seen since Jim Thompson or James Ellroy. With a slender frame, gray beard, and genial but slightly haunted expression, Lange scans the dining room before beaming, “I love this place!” Lange writes hardboiled fiction that ranges from gnarly to downright dark, but you would never know it by his benign and unruffled demeanor — and with the recent release of his latest novel, Joe Hustle, Lange has a lot to smile about. 

Since the 2007 publication of his debut short story collection, Dead Boys, which is like Denis Johnson’s scabrous Jesus’ Son but with guns and palm trees, the 61-year-old Lange’s fascination with lost souls living on the fringes of society has only deepened. The lone outlier is Rovers, Lange’s horror novel, which Stephen King called the best vampire novel he’d read since Let the Right One In. Lange admits he threw a curveball with Rovers: “My publishers called me and were like, ‘Why did you write a horror book? You’re going to lose your readership! You’re going to ruin your career!’ I was just happy to hear them say I have a career!” He laughs. “But I write what inspires me at the time. What can you do?”

Although he’s known as a noir writer, Lange isn’t interested in private eyes, cops, or the dirty deeds of the 1%. His taste veers toward hustlers, alcoholics, gang members, ex-cons, and the everyman struggling with a criminal background. “Although I enjoy reading detective novels, particularly Ross MacDonald, I’m just not into writing procedural stories,” Lange admits, as we take a red-leather booth. “I never set out to write crime fiction. I’m just fascinated with interesting characters.”

“I learned more about the world from working at that supermarket than I ever did in school.”

With a combination of Robert Stone’s grit  and Elmore Leonard’s humor, Lange’s books are thrilling and propulsive, but also stark, introspective, and realistic. They take place in bars, motels, laundromats, highways, and the dark corners of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Mexico. A modernist at heart, his ability to slip into a character’s consciousness is downright Joycean, and his interior monologues are like Virginia Woolf on whiskey and bad speed. As readers, we experience the streets on a textured and visceral level, viewing the contemporary world through a cracked and, at times, absurdist lens. And there’s always an element of menace creeping underneath the narrative. By occupying that space between perception and reality, Lange also taps into a particular fear and paranoia only ex-cons or the truly alienated can grasp. Take the following excerpt from Joe Hustle, in which our titular protagonist moves through the city in the dead of night while carrying contraband:

He’s fizzing with dread as he walks to the house, the gun in his waistband, the dope in his pocket. He’s a felon in possession of heroin and a firearm, a fucking idiot with a one-way ticket back to prison. A squirrel chattering at the top of a palm tree nearly stops his heart, and he feels eyes on him everywhere.

At times, Lange’s writing is so authentic you’ll wonder if he spent time in prison himself. “No,” he says, smiling, almost flattered. “But I’m glad you think so.” And like any good writer, he knows his city intimately. Los Angeles isn’t just home but an endless wellspring of inspiration — its smells, sounds, rhythms, and specific existential angst. In Lange’s books, Los Angeles takes on different guises; sometimes it’s amiable and welcoming, at other times, not so much. In this excerpt from “Bank of America,” in Dead Boys, the hero plans a bank robbery with his friends but keeps getting interrupted by the vibrations of the city itself:  

It must be a thousand degrees outside. Even with two fans whirring and all the windows open, the air just lies there, hot and thick as bacon grease. One story below, down on Hollywood, an old Armenian woman is crying. She sits on a bus bench, rocking back and forth, a black scarf wrapped around her head. Her sobs distract me from Moriarty’s presentation. He asks a question, and I don’t even hear him.

Born in Oakland, California, Lange’s family moved around before settling in the coastal town of Morro Bay. Growing up, he devoured comics and movies, until he discovered Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. “After that, I abandoned comic books and sci-fi novels for good,” he says, chuckling, as we dig into our enchiladas and (literally) flaming margaritas. Lange was accepted to the University of Southern California’s film school on a scholarship. “It was the early ’80s. A crazy time in downtown L.A. I was always broke. When I wasn’t in class, I worked 35 hours a week in a supermarket near the campus. That’s where I met people from all different cultures and backgrounds, wonderful, interesting people I would’ve never met back home. I learned more about the world from working at that supermarket than I ever did in school.”

After college, Lange worked at various bookstores in Los Angeles before being hired as a copyeditor at Larry Flynt Publications, the porn empire most famous for Hustler magazine, then eventually as managing editor for RIP, which was a popular heavy metal magazine at the time. “I was there for nearly eight years. Until the second Nirvana broke and murdered the heavy metal scene overnight,” he says. While working as an editor, Lange would go home each night and write stories. “I just thought I’d work a regular job for the rest of my life and occasionally get a story published,” Lange says, shrugging. “But things changed.”

“I’d rather write a scene where Joe changes a thermocouple on a water heater than like … a detective interviewing a suspect.”

When Dead Boys was published, Lange realized he might possibly become a full-time writer. “I remember I needed to follow up Dead Boys with a novel. I opened my drawer and realized I had given them everything I wrote,” he recalls with a heavy stare, shuddering at the memory. He quickly got to work, and over the next 17 years cranked out This Wicked World, Angel Baby, Sweet Nothing, The Smack, Rovers, and now, Joe Hustle. In doing so, Lange became one of the best crime writers Los Angeles has ever produced.

Joe Hustle isn’t just a return to the streets of Echo Park (where the author has lived with his wife for two decades), but a venture into something new: the love story. The protagonist earned his nickname by taking every two-bit gig he could scrounge while barely making rent at the flophouse he lives in with other luckless miscreants. Although he always tries to fly straight and keep his head down, his criminal past and severe PTSD, developed after fighting in the Iraq War, frequently threaten to break his resolve. Sometimes he’s forced to release what’s boiling inside him and punch someone in the face. Then one day he meets Emily, the intriguing daughter of a wealthy family, and his world splinters into a million pieces.

Although Joe Hustle’s story is simpler and more straightforward than in Lange’s previous novels, the characterization of Joe is more complex. “That was deliberate,” he says. “After my last few books, which were pretty reliant on plot, I wanted to go back to my short stories, which were more character-based. And I wanted to bring it all back to L.A., to my neighborhood, Echo Park.”

“Anti-heroes. You’ll find a lot of them out here.”

In tackling a love story, which was relatively new for someone usually fascinated with gang members, tattooed bartenders, traumatized war vets, and shattered women escaping abusive marriages (although Joe Hustle does feature similar characters and imagery), Lange says he was inspired by filmmakers he loves. “Well, for the romance aspect of Joe Hustle, I thought a lot about Cassavetes,” he explains. “You know, A Woman Under the Influence or Minnie and Moskowitz, stories about people who get together that are nuts. The French call it ‘Amour Fou.’ Personally, I’ve never experienced anything like Joe and Emily’s whirlwind relationship. I’ve had some crazy love affairs, but I’ve been with the same woman for 30 years.” Lange looks off in the distance, as if weighing his characters’ troubled fates, before sighing, “Thank God.”

Lange obviously loves Joe Hustle, a scruffy vet who is ambitious but slightly paranoid, passionate but prone to bouts of drunkenness and self-pity. Joe is more than just an eccentric character, he’s also an evocation of the ravaged world we live in now. “He was based on a bartender I knew at the Short Stop, which is a bar near Dodger’s Stadium,” Lange recollects. “I called him ‘Joe Hustle.’ He hustled all the time. He painted houses, toured in bands. The book isn’t his life story or anything, he inspired it. The real guy passed away a couple years ago, but I think his spirit animates the book.”

Joe Hustle is one of Lange’s crowning achievements. The writing is engaging and humanistic without treading into sentimentality, something Lange has never been accused of. In many ways, his prose is closer to the brusque and whimsical writing of L.A.’s proletariat author John Fante than to your average mystery scribe. Always humble, Lange shrugs and says, “Honestly, I would never call myself a ‘crime writer,’ I’m not that good. There are so many good crime writers out there, it would be presumptuous for me to say that….” He trails off. “Like we talked about, I don’t care about plot that much. I’m much more into character. I’d rather write a scene where Joe changes a thermocouple on a water heater than like … a detective interviewing a suspect.”  

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you shelve Richard Lange in literature or noir — for my money, he’s a modern-day Jim Thompson, the renowned L.A. crime novelist from the ’50s and ’60s. Lange’s expression brightens when I mention Thompson. “Yeah? Great. I mean, Thompson is daaaarrk. I wouldn’t even put him in the noir section. He’s like Bukowski with a little crime mixed in. I’d call it ‘Grit Lit.’ Thompson gets under the surface of things.” Lange chortles. “There’s a reason he’s big in France.”

Walking out of the dark confines of El Compadre on a summer afternoon is like being slapped in the face with sunshine, smog, and noise. Cars pile up on Sunset while the sounds of construction sites, car horns, and blaring radios swell to a crescendo. Lange squints and puts on a pair of sunglasses. Before parting ways, I ask him how he would describe his books to someone not familiar with his work. “That’s a tough one,” he says, pondering, rubbing his gray beard. “The important thing is to get people to relate to characters they normally wouldn’t be interested in. You know, people you might turn your nose up at in real life. My goal is for the reader to root for them by the end of the book. Anti-heroes. You’ll find a lot of them out here.”

And what about Los Angeles? Does he still derive inspiration from a city that has gone through innumerable changes? “Oh yeah.” Lange beams. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else. My wife and I still live near Sunset Boulevard, which can still get fucking crazy. I swear, if you go the wrong way, it’s bad luck,” he adds, with that same haunted look I caught earlier. “For me, Los Angeles has never lost its romance. It still works for me.”  ❖

Chad Byrnes has been a film critic for the L.A. Weekly and the Village Voice for six years. He lives in Los Angeles.