Halfway Pass Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi Personality Crisis: Only One night , David Johansen’s satirical musings on a VH1 special in which he starred alone recorded his animal medley, recorded under his own name, and for the immortal “Hot Hot Hot” as Buster Poindexter.
How can one person be a one-hit wonder twice Also, as New York Dolls and lead singer of one of the most influential rock bands of the past years ? Scorsese and Tedeschi titled their documentary about Johansen’s personality crisis aptly. Granted, it’s also the first track on the first New York Dolls album, but it’s still fitting because the documentary is a portrait of reconciled identities. It’s between a bandmate, a solo artist, an alter ego and a guy who’s now in his 2020 The dots connects, feeling no obligation to commit to being any of them. Personality Crisis: Only One Night
Bottom line About a sign An intimate musical primer for sex artists.
Air Date: Friday, April 8pm (show time)
Director: Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi
Some aspects of Johansen’s life and art history may be Found by some to be unexplored or underexplored personality crisis . But it’s a documentary about pure musical moments and the artful connection between culture and the city that all the principals here love.
This documentary was made around January 2020 – Johansen’s 14 birthday, it turns out – at Café Carlyle , an intimate venue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that only hosts , this time it looked packed with friends and loved ones—some People are very familiar.
One of the first songs Johansen performed in concert was “Plenty of Music” and its lyrics, “I feel banished from mine by divinity, me and these sad friends.” But much of the poignancy of the documentary The point is that, despite the friends he’s lost along the way, Johansen may be closer than ever to the divine and the music, and to be surrounded by it.
Scorsese, of course, is a filmmaker with an impeccable intersection between eye and ear, as he always does in concert films That way, his sense of where the camera is placed is uncanny. It’s a lot easier here than it is to document The Band’s career-capping dancehall show or the Rolling Stones’ stadium tour. It’s a small venue and a small stage, but the director has an innate sense of when to let the audience experience the moment as part of the audience, and when to give that intimacy you can never get by buying a ticket.
As Johansen sinks into the lyrics – I’m familiar with the New York Dolls but never thought about them so much – the camera hovers inches away From his face, each musician gets a beat or two in the spotlight when his small ensemble members go solo. You’ll wish you’d been there, but you’ll feel like you were there.
Johansen with him at or at 4112006 One of the filmmakers’ best tricks is, whenever possible, switching between performances of the same song at different career moments, from confrontational proto-punk, to swaggering rock, to performative lazy lizard , to the current incarnation, a reflective composition of everything that came before.
Johansen, the son of an opera singer, has music in his DNA, and this documentary sets the tone for the likes of Maria Callas and John Cage, as well as teen films The show made room for New York Doll lover Morrissey. It’s easy to think that David Johansen’s purest evocation might not be any of his singing roles, but his gig as Sirius radio host Mansion of Fun, which allows him to play as he pleases while philosophizing between pieces.
It’s kind of like what the director here is doing. Kind of like the template Scorsese built on The Last Waltz – my undisputed choice as the best concert film ever made, and me as Scorsese’s The choice for best film is more controversial – Personality Crisis keeps every performance at Café Carlyle full and uninterrupted, and keeps some enjoyable on stage twists and turns.
Between the songs, though, it’s a more traditional biopic, with archival interviews with Johansen and rich Insights driven by current conversations. Is it ace cinematographer Ellen Kuras? Or Johansen’s daughter, Leah Hennessey, a director herself? Not sure, but Johansen is generally in good shape, looking back at the influences and opportunities that shaped him.
Considering the filmmakers involved, Johansen and the documentary are heavily invested in shaping the community mix of the Staten Island-raised singer It’s no surprise, then, that his identity is a melting pot for the city itself.
Somewhere personality crisis can dig deeper. As a Freudian blunder, Johansen referred to his “bisexual” residency at a Carlyle café, while it was Morrissey who linked the New York Dolls to “trans issues.” But beyond associating the band’s attire with the convenience of thrift stores, Johansen only circles around the role gender identity plays in his artistic identity.
He doesn’t shy away from the popular “Hot, Hot, Hot” hate at all, he never has. But as a 80 kid, his first contact with him was as Buster Poindexter And having only learned about the New York Dolls decades later, the character’s success and his subsequent stature in Johansen’s career was more interesting to me than the film had time to portray.
In 100 minutes, The personality crisis is already on the overstuffed side, so I guess it’s back to my favorite refrain: This could be a TV show. Since Scorsese first documented Fran Lebowitz’s feature-length story in Public Speaking, and then a decade later in the more New York-centric Netflix series Fran Leibovitz Pretending It’s a City , and perhaps he will, too, after this soulful primer with Johansen. Something built around Johansen’s New York and the Mansion of Fun would be perfect.
