Skip to main content
DOCUMENTARY PICK:
In the ruminating rock doc Personality Crisis: One Night Only, David Johansen’s battered vocal cords need about an hour to warm up. With 6 inches of pompadour and six decades of yarns, the New York Dolls frontman (later Buster Poindexter) serenades the Café Carlyle in Personality Crisis’ central performance.
It’s obvious why this slender vessel of New York and rock history would interest Martin Scorsese, co-directing here with David Tedeschi, the editor of Scorsese’s last music documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue (2019). Here, Scorsese structurally emulates The Last Waltz (1978), honoring the concert’s flow and venturing into interviews and archival collages between songs.
That approach affords the film and its audience time to warm up alongside Johansen. Slowly, the lounge lizard’s boozy, Teflon artifice is suffused with melancholy, humility and depth, as we begin to feel the oceans of water under the bridge and all the possible pleas for fame and credit that Johansen doesn’t make.
Like most genuine counterculturalists who pass age 70, Johansen is imbued with the power of surviving in a world that picked off his friends and never knew what to do with him, save profitable imitation. Johansen’s not bitter, but when he growls the blues, there’s every reason to listen and—in the Carlyle’s confines—luxuriate. Paramount+.
