Personality Crisis: One Night Only — first-look… | Little White Lies

Festivals

Per­son­al­i­ty Cri­sis: One Night Only — first-look review

17 Oct 2022

Words by Charles Bramesco

A man with long hair and sunglasses singing into a microphone on stage, accompanied by a guitarist.
A man with long hair and sunglasses singing into a microphone on stage, accompanied by a guitarist.
New York Dolls front­man David Johansen takes the stage in Mar­tin Scors­ese’s lat­est music doc.

The first New York Dolls gig was at the Endi­cott Hotel, a home­less shel­ter. In the con­cert doc­u­men­tary Per­son­al­i­ty Cri­sis, the band’s last man stand­ing David Johansen takes the stage at the Café Car­lyle, an august tem­ple to jazz with a dress code, wall art that can be taught like a his­to­ry les­son, and a celebri­ty clien­tele that includ­ed Deb­bie Har­ry and Ari Aster on the night record­ed for pos­ter­i­ty by codi­rec­tors Mar­tin Scors­ese and David Tedeschi.

The room known for host­ing Woody Allens clar­inet recitals is a far cry from Johansen’s mem­o­ry of a Ger­man beer hall show end­ing in a chain reac­tion of vom­it gey­sers, fond­ly recount­ed as the big bang of punk in an insert­ed inter­view with Conan O’Brien. Aging has an unkind way of dulling the edges on hell­rais­ing types like this. But with lines etched on his round­ed muz­zle and a tall orange cock­tail in hand, Johansen makes for a fine lounge lizard on his sev­en­ti­eth birth­day, pre­sid­ing as a wise­crack­ing elder states­man and trou­ba­dour for a crowd — on site, and now in the­aters or the com­fort of their own homes — keen on a sec­ond­hand bite of the bygone Big Apple whose lega­cy he keeps.

Johansen can ban­ter with the best of them, armed with hours of delight­ful­ly scuzzy anec­dotes from his years in and out of the down­town art-freak scene, where the Dolls were hailed as pro­to-glam heroes for their cross-dress­ing and anar­chic gen­der play. In lush yel­low-green cin­e­matog­ra­phy (even with his reg­u­lar music-doc edi­tor now shar­ing direc­tor cred­it, the Scors­ese touch is evi­dent in the hand­some visu­al tex­ture both expert­ly cal­i­brat­ed and organ­i­cal­ly lived-in), he grins his way through slangy sto­ry­time ses­sions about get­ting high with Todd Rund­gren or palling around with per­for­mance artist Pen­ny Arcade and their grungy com­rades in the The­ater of the Ridiculous.

When he’s not sharp-shoot­ing the breeze, Johansen puts on a spell­bind­ing act. The rav­ages of time agree with his voice, a weath­ered air of expe­ri­ence enrich­ing the tim­bre on his casu­al, con­ver­sa­tion­al man­ner. He’s too in on his own joke to risk self-par­o­dy, insu­lat­ed from the how-ya-doin’-folks” ham­mi­ness endem­ic to lounge singer-kind by his iron­ic wit. He regales us with the time he met Miloš For­man and audi­tioned for the film adap­ta­tion of Hair, only to get flat­ly reject­ed by a music direc­tor inform­ing him that he was a ter­ri­ble singer; he laughs through this telling because he still knows bet­ter than to believe the guy.

That lit­tle gem fits into a thread of loose biog­ra­phy that breaks up the on-stage footage and gives struc­ture to two long hours that can some­times try the patience of those not already invest­ed in the sub­ject at hand. Parts of the back­ground fill­ing-in have the oblig­a­tory rote­ness of a book report, though Johansen ben­e­fits from hav­ing con­duct­ed him­self like a lib­er­tine for fifty years, the Cliff’s Notes ver­sion of his life still chock­ablock with amus­ing asides. As we’re tak­en through his Buster Poindex­ter peri­od of self-rein­ven­tion, he con­fess­es that he rues the record­ing of Hot, Hot, Hot” that out­sold the music he real­ly cared about — the bane of any artist’s existence.

A wily old hooli­gan with plen­ty of bat­tery acid still pump­ing through his veins, Johansen won’t allow him­self to be turned into a muse­um piece vis­it­ed as a link to the past. In the mid-pan­dem­ic inter­view seg­ments with his daugh­ter, he talks about how much he still has to enjoy, and the film exists to illus­trate exact­ly what he means. Up there, under the lights, mic in hand like an exten­sion of his arm, it cer­tain­ly seems like he could very well live forever.

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