“CBGB” doesn’t work for all the right reasons. Musically, the money shot, why we are here, is dreadful. From Debbie to Iggy to Stiv and on, none of the actors portraying the icons have the slightest concept of who they are performing. At least conceptually, Malin Ackerman should have been able to pull off Debbie Harry; Debbie’s entire schtick was dayglo sex symbol ice cold goddess, all Malin had to do was keep her cool. The question of impression becomes even clearer with one of the major characters,the late Merv Ferguson, a great guy who I knew pretty well and always let me in free, was except for the hard hat nothing like Donal Logue.I lived in the same Hotel as Stiv Bators and I liked him a lot and Justin Bartha has no resemblance to Stiv whatsoever. I have a friend who is gonna go ballistic when she sees it.
But once you’ve said, OK, it is more like an SNL skit than a real acting gig and get over that director Randall Miller is a twerp, you are stuck with the wraparound concept. Punk, the fanzine created by John Holstrom and writer Legs McNeil near the beginning of the revolution, is used as a Greek chorus, just to rub our noses in what is self-evident about the Bowery rock Mecca night club. It interrupts the goings on by turning it into a Batman The TV Series comic strip. Holstrom is a real good cartoonist but if there was anything to get in the way of, they’d get in the way.
Alan Rickman, reunited with Rupert Grint, is why the movie really sinks. Randall has a point of view, he isn’t REALLY interested in CBGB’s as history, music as revolution, the nightclub as lifestyle, Randall is interested in Hilly Kristal and Rickman is front and center for the entire movie. It is Rickman’s to blow and blow it he does. It isn’t necessarily Rickman’s fault Hilly comes across, or rather doesn’t come across, as a cipher, but that loud sucking noise is where Kristal should be. If you see your center of gravity as a diffused man who lacks focus, either give him focus, or don’t make him your center. “CBGB” does neither and this is one meandering bore of a movie.
Hilly went from being the night manager of the Village Vanguard to going bankrupt twice trying to run bars, to hitting pay dirt. The movie follows Hilly through the birth of the punk rock scene when he hired bands to perform only original material. According to the movie, he was a disorganized mess who invested every penny in managing the Dead Boys and when the band failed to explode, went bankrupt. Finally,in a scene straight out of “It’s A Wonderful Life”, bankrupt and ready to close the bar (1979 according to this show) after the stabbing of Johnny Blitz left the Dead Boy’s in disarray, the community come together to pay the rent.
I remember those days very well, and I remember a huge benefit being played for Johnny Blitz. I went to see Costello before the show and then went to CBGB’s to watch John Belushi play drums with the Dead Boys and every punk star in the world perform.
Look, I’ll forgive Randall everything if he just had the slightest feel for the time and place. Focusing on Hilly wasn’t the worst idea in the world and the script would hang as a script, or at least a coherent story, if there was a little more to it. But it gets the picture wrong, the little picture wrong, the big picture wrong, and every thing in between. It doesn’t have the slightest feel for time and place and is worse than I could possibly imagine. Among the many things CBGB’s wasn’t (and certainly, who went their after the mid-1980s?) it was sure fun. This movie is nothing of the sort. Filled with feces and bodily fluids, it is a nauseating and boring.
PS they took it off Youtube.
Grade: D