New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 5

Personality Crisis: One Night Only (Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi)

A long-overdue hagiography of the great David Johansen, Personality Crisis: One Night Only documents a January 2020 performance when Johansen brought his Buster Poindexter persona uptown to the tony boîte Cafe Carlyle. Performing on his 70th birthday, Johansen reconceives Poindexter as a raconteur-cum-spritiual-guru as he runs through the Johansen songbook including numbers from David solo and the New York Dolls. The set leans heavily on 2006's One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, the Dolls' comeback after 32 years and the songs survive the cocktail-lounge treatment; it serves to highlight Johansen the heartbreaking melodist. Archival footage and current interviews fill out the 127-minute running time and round out a portrait of an nonpareil artist who seems glad to be alive and bears no bitterness over lesser bands like Aerosmith and Kiss taking Johansen's shtick to greater financial reward. 

But that archival footage poses a problem. Scorsese and Tedeschi include a 1973 episode of the British television show The Old Grey Whistle Test with the Dolls performing "Jet Boy." The clip helps cement their status as the greatest rock 'n' roll combo in the history of popular music. Johansen pouts and prances as much as he taunts, shouting directly into the camera and demanding we take the tumult uncut. And mind, this is a lip-sync performance. But few, if any, performers can match that energy in their 70s and Personality Crisis ignores a crucial question: must all popular music, even rock 'n' roll at its most demanding, be transformed into Great American Songbook fodder sung over spilled Cosmopolitans at the piano?

Take the songs from One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This  That album is now sixteen years old (gah!) and the day mentioned in the title has finally arrived. Personality Crisis will please you. But if those songs have always sounded a tad too professional, especially up against the world-historic ruckus the Dolls caused in the early 1970s, they sound like a final chapter here: winning, committed, worth celebrating but giving off a noticeable scent of formaldehyde. I do too want the Johansen songbook sung at the Townhouse or Marie's Crisis alongside the endless show tunes. But I also want another chapter while Johansen still roams the earth. And no matter moving and welcome, Personality Crisis isn't it.

Grade: A-minus