Review: "Bright Lights, Big City" (1988)

Continuing my catalogue of oft-forgotten NYC movies, my latest is Bright Lights, Big City from 1988. It's based on the 1984 debut novel by Jay McInerney who was one of the era's "brat pack" authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz who published popular novels that were quickly made into movies.

When the book came out it made quite a splash due to the youth of the author, the zeitgeisti-iness of the story (a young man, like the author, navigating the world of NYC media, money, club culture, and drugs), and the fact that it was written in the second person (the narrator refers to "you" instead of the first-person "I" or third-person "he/she"). The plot concerns a guy named Jamie who lives in NYC and works as a fact-checker at a magazine that's basically supposed to be the stodgy and boring pre-Tina Brown/David Remnick version of The New Yorker (it had yet to transform itself into a media powerhouse). Jamie is trying to write a novel and live out his fantasies of being a literary star but he's been side-tracked by the recent death of his mother, his wife who has suddenly and inexplicably left him, and his growing drug addiction fueled by a sleazy guy named Tad. When not working and struggling to write, he spends his time snorting drugs and hanging out in clubs with Tad, processing his anguish over his marriage and mother. Eventually a series of events leads him to realize that he needs to change. And that's basically the whole story.

So is it a good movie?

Eh ... it's okay. The main problem is that Michael J. Fox, who plays Jamie, is totally miscast. Don't get me wrong, I love Fox in just about anything but he simply wasn't the right choice for this part. He was cast, I assume, because he was a massive star at the time, still riding the success of Back to the Future (this movie actually came out just before the two sequels and was part of Fox's dramatic interregnum) and he was still being watched by tens of millions of people a week on TV in Family Ties. (Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr. were considered for the part at the time and would have been much more believable as cokeheads because, well ...). Actually the best and most compelling performance is by Keifer Sutherland as Tad -- he's perfectly cast -- and you almost wish the movie was about him! The rest of the cast -- Swoozie Kurtz, Phoebe Cates, the late great John Houseman and Jason Robards -- are fine but they have little to do (Robards is only in a couple of scenes and is drunk in both of them). The movie was directed by a man named James Bridges (who died in the early 1990s) and who had earlier directed the classics The Paper Chase and Urban Cowboy. This did not have the same success as those. 

But it's still worth seeing for a couple of reasons.

First, flawed as this movie is, it's interesting to see because it's the kind of earnest, humane, character-driven sort of movie that the big studios hardly make anymore. It's an attempt to do something more interior, more emotionally complex, even if it doesn't entirely succeed and the result is mostly just depressing. Second, it's a fascianting piece of late 1980s NYC slife-of-life, of a world that's both recent and hopelessly in the past, of a city that feels so close but also so far away. 

If you want to know what NYC in the 1980s was like, this is the movie to watch. 

P.S. It's hard to remember now but, at the time, the author of the book, Jay McInerney, was being heralded as a 1980s F. Scott Fitzgerald. The big success of "Bright Lights, Big City" led many to believe that literary greatness awaited him, that this novel was a solid start and that even better ones would come along ... Yeah, not so much. He wrote several more novels, some better received than others, but none had the success or acclaim of his first one. These days he's better known as a Man-About-Town (he married a Hearst) and a wine critic. But who knows ... maybe one day he will produce his Gatsby but we're still waiting.