A musical lesson in overcoming fame, success, and power
David Johansen, lead singer of the ’70s proto-punk band the New York Dolls, does not belong at Café Carlyle, but the concert film documenting that unlikely uptown move is the most revealing portrait of urban mobility that Martin Scorsese has ever made. The transition from grungy downtown rock and roll to a setting famous for bourgeois sophistication (Bobby Short’s old sinecure from American trash) shows more than just Johansen’s career journey. Personality Crisis: One Night Only also reflects Scorsese’s personal story. It parallels Scorsese’s self-conscious rise and fall from independent artist to Hollywood potentate struggling with an inescapable legend as the bard of gangster violence and ethnic urban anomie.
Scorsese’s Mean Streets premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1973, the same year as the eponymous New York Dolls debut album that similarly influenced a generation of young artists. (Personality Crisis almost goes off course with Morrissey rhapsodizing about the group’s significance, taken from Greg Whiteley’s 2006 doc New York Doll.) Both Scorsese’s film and the Dolls’ album were products of New York’s underclass — one based in Catholic guilt, the other in social resistance through drugs and sexual challenge. Each was a great, exhilarating landmark that Scorsese and Johansen could hardly surpass.
In Make Spielberg Great Again, I chronicled a Seventies filmmaker’s spiritual and political alienation from his artistic starting point. Scorsese’s latest films (Hugo, The Silence, The Irishman) display a similar creative crisis, but here’s rock musician Johansen playing it out at the Carlyle. At age 70 when the show was filmed in 2020, Johansen was no longer the youthful androgynous Dolls provocateur. He had ditched the Mick Jagger cosplay of his first solo albums to adopt a second persona as Buster Poindexter, a comic lounge singer now with a pencil-thin moustache and a high combed-back pompadour with gray in it. He towers in front of his four-man musical combo, lurching slightly like Nosferatu confronting mortality — but with defiant humor and much-needed eyeglasses. Joking his way through age, career confusion, and surviving — artistry intact — seems to have inspired 80-year-old Scorsese, a rock-and-roll adept who nonetheless foundered shockingly with the mockumentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. Dylan story. Who knew Scorsese liked punk rock?
During an interview segment, Johansen flinches at the term “banter,” yet his on-stage repartee (the “boîte” filled with friends, including Debbie Harry) affectionately recalls earlier days of the New York underground culture — the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Mercer Arts Center, Fluxus, and Max’s Kansas City — that overlapped with Andy Warhol’s world.
Scorsese (and co-director David Tedeschi) alternates Johansen’s recollections with dazzling match-cuts of vintage Dolls footage. He records the Café Carlyle show so that Johansen’s new songs express mature resignation and inspire a new concentration unlike the usual Scorsese flamboyance — almost on a level with Jonathan Demme’s moving, spiritually lucid Neil Young film Heart of Gold. Johansen’s own “Heart of Gold” is self-deprecating, not sentimental, and this difference suggests superior artistry and a healthier worldview than that of today’s cantankerous old Neil clinging to failed hippiedom.
Personality Crisis is fascinating for how Johansen, as a songwriter, puts life and showbiz struggle in his own bridge-and-tunnel vernacular: “It all comes down to melody.” That phrase alludes to the rhythmic excitement of the best rock — what Scorsese’s filmmaking used to have. Rolling Thunder Revue got ruinously fancy, but here Scorsese is smart enough to calm down, realizing that the image of Johansen’s senior years is the truest sign of spiritual struggle, which his recent movies have lacked. Skirting PC trendiness, Scorsese relies on Johansen’s definition of the Dolls’ art and artifice: “It was the lie that tells the truth. It gets to the point.”
Johansen’s satirical lounge-lizard act, complete with the Staten Island accent, bespeaks a cagey but genuine sophistication. (August Darnell’s Kid Creole is a comparable example of American class adventure.) Johansen’s songs — “Lonely Planet Boy,” “Frenchette,” and the Dolls’ magisterial “Frankenstein,” the best explanation of teenage alienation I know — are artifacts of moral experience. They inevitably led to Johansen’s mature resignation. (A mid-tempo rendition of the Dolls’ “Personality Crisis” is still a thrill.) His new “Maimed Beauty” comes from William James, and “Eternal Spirit” might have been written expressly for Marty “Mr. Hollywood” Scorsese: “What’s the use of all this praying when I don’t know the spirit it comes from?”
The aspiration and resilience Johansen displays (he tells a charming anecdote about almost starring in Milos Forman’s Hair) seem to elude filmmaking artists such as Scorsese and Spielberg. They become trapped by success, fame, and the power of political influence. (Johansen remembers his mother scolding “You’re a Communist dupe.” He reflects: “Maybe I was.”) That Johansen now considers “Hot, Hot, Hot,” his Buster Poindexter signature song, “the bane of my existence” is as encouraging as if Scorsese apologized for the atrocious Aviator and Shutter Island. Still working and thinking it all out, Johansen presents a life in art and trash as an existential endeavor. Long-suffering Scorsese could use Johansen’s credo: “I just wanted to bring those walls down and have a party.” The New York Film Festival’s world premiere of Personality Crisis looks like a one-man show, but it’s a sobering revival of two artists.