‘Personality Crisis: One Night Only’: IDFA Review

Dirs/scrs: Martin Scorsese, David Tedeschi. USA. 2022. 127mins

A grinning Dionysian imp delivers a showbiz masterclass in Personality Crisis: One Night Only, the latest in Martin Scorsese’s occasional series of music-related documentaries. Edited and co-directed with David Tedeschi, it lavishly (and persuasively) lauds glam/punk/rock/pop survivor David Johansen and his lounge-cabaret persona Buster Poindexter. The directorial pair — previously responsible for 2014’s New York Review of Books celebration The 50 Year Argument — blend excellent archival materials and new interview footage (conducted and shot by Johansen’s daughter) with a record of Johansen’s popular residency at Manhattan’s upscale, bijou Café Carlyle.

Obvious catnip for fans of the still-lithe veteran

World premiering at the New York Film Festival before bowing internationally at IDFA, the results will stream via Showtime in 2023. But, more on the basis of Scorsese’s name than Johansen’s, it could be plausibly positioned around further festivals as a draw for older audiences who recall the gravel-voiced singer’s early-70s pomp as frontman for cross-dressing proto-punk pioneers The New York Dolls

The now-septuagenarian Johansen has, perhaps inevitably, left those wild days far behind; his appeal is calculatedly retro and — the title of the second song here — “funky but chic.” Shot over two nights in early January 2020 (one of them the occasion of Johansen’s 70th birthday) but near-seamlessly made to look like a single evening, the result will be obvious catnip for fans of the still-lithe veteran. A svelte, quite petite presence beneath Poindexter’s extravagant trademark pompadour hairstyle, Johansen dominates the small stage throughout, smartly attired in lightly spangling black suit, open-necked white shirt (a touch of Nick Cave) and ever-present shades. 

Never quite a household name, his only real solo hit being up-tempo calypso cover “Hot! Hot! Hot!” under the Poindexter alias in 1987, Johansen is an intriguingly unclassifiable cultural presence. The Staten Islander has been kicking around in the Manhattan zeitgeist in one form or another for a full half-century now. His most notable previous big-screen appearance was as a scenestealing supporting role as the Ghost of Christmas Past opposite his pal Bill Murray in Scrooged (1988); he also popped up alongside the star in a previous Carlyle-focused Netflix enterprise, Sofia Coppola’s A Very Murray Christmas (2015).

But Johansen — backed by the energetic Boys In the Band Band (sic) — is very much front and centre here across two full hours. While finding him in solid enough voice, the film is an even more effective showcase for his spoken-word talents as sharp, amiable raconteur and rambunctious comic. He specifically valorises “intelligent ridiculousness,” and not for nothing is his radio show entitled The Mansion of Fun.

Indeed, among recent examples of the concert-film sub-genre, Personality Crisis — which takes its name from the only New York Dolls track popular beyond their devoted coterie —  perhaps most closely resembles not so much Spike Lee’s David Byrne spectacular American Utopia (2020) as Thom Zimny’s Emmy-winning Bruce Springsteen: Live on Broadway (2018). In that 153-minute epic, also a Netflix production shot in a relatively “intimate” Manhattan venue, The Boss alternated his classic tracks with spoken interludes of such insight, wit and charisma that some viewers were taken by pleasant surprise.

And while Johansen will never approach his New Jersey near-contemporary as a songwriter nor even as a singer — the only real showstopper here is the tenth of the 13 tracks performed, uptempo rocker “Frenchette (Let’s Just Dance”) — he skilfully holds the Carlyle crowd with his “shtick” and patter via a string of bawdy, confessional anecdotes. While audience reaction-shots are few and far between, the presence of fellow icons/survivors Debbie Harry and Penny Arcade is discreetly noted on more than one occasion.

Scorsese and Tedeschi keep things pretty straightforward and conventional in terms of stagecraft, the former once again revelling in the kind of controlled, professional showmanship he has adoringly chronicled going way back to De Niro and Minnelli (the latter amusingly namechecked here) in New York, New York and even beyond. Indeed, the duo perhaps are a little too much in love with their subject: there’s no special reason for Personality Crisis to sprawl beyond two hours (it ends up 13 minutes longer than Taxi Driver). Thus is contravened the first and most immutable rule of showbusiness, that one should always leave ’em wanting more.