Life is what we make of it. We’re all bound to experience the strange, the wonderful, the fear-inducing, and breathtaking moments of brevity that redefine our persona, characteristics, and outlook for the next few million breaths we take. What makes a documentary, specifically one whose subject matter is a particular person, so beautiful, is that it takes the time to examine those moments in an attempt to retell, relive, and analyze the minute and the gravity-defining moments that culminated to make a human existence. This one that I’ve just seen, “Personality Crisis: One Night Only”, is one of those good ones that make you really think of life in those terms.
The film follows David Johansen on the night of his 70th birthday as he performs live at the Carlyle in New York. With each song he sings, he flashes back to a moment in his life that stood out to him. Unlike the typical documentarian trope of looking back at the ‘little moment that would actually change everything’, each flashback was just a look back at a moment that David himself remembered and found endearing. It’s such a misnomer or mistake in thinking to believe that the moments we would remember the most are the peaks, the rises, and the falls of our life. It’s always been the little things and it’ll always be the little things.
David Johansen makes such an interesting subject matter to demonstrate this because he himself, as part of the famed and much respected New York Dollsand other great acts, was on the forefront as one of the pioneers of the punk movement. Despite all of that, he tended to remember the small anecdotes, such as funny missed opportunities, unorthodox occupations he held, and the strange characters he met along the way.
This documentary doesn’t feel like many others. Somewhat understandably so as it had Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi helming this operation. Both had witnessed David live one night at that Carlyle and as Martin recollected, he said to David in the most Hollywood of New York things to say “What do you want to do? Let’s shoot it! Let’s make a movie! … What’s it going to be about? The soul of the cabaret act itself? Well, let’s shoot that and let’s begin.”. I love that this was the moment of conception for this film as, just like the film itself, it started off as something small as ‘we gotta get a camera on it and see where this goes’.
At two hours long, the film does drag quite a bit. It does capture a large majority of a live performance that David would give and approximately 50% of the movie, if not more, is just devoted to live music. This is what Scorsese intended to do anyhow. After the film screened, he said “We decided at that point to shoot a concert for history… They’re all experiments guys, that’s what [it] is”. Still, unless you’re a big fan of David Johansen or his alter ego Buster Poindexter, I would imagine that you’d find yourself checking your watch at some point. It makes for a great background piece for a New York party or as a historical look into old New York and for those reasons, I think it’s definitely worth a watch, even in passing on streaming.
