not fade away: old scrapbooks

Not Fade Away: (2012. dir: David Chase) It's too bad: this might have been a great film. Seriously, it missed greatness, weirdly, by a small margin, but in such a way that it nearly missed being even good.

You can't call it low-budget; the music alone must have cost a millon bucks. It's astonishing: classic Stones, classic Beatles, and my favorite Sex Pistols track, where they're messing around in the studio and play "Roadrunner" ("Oy! Do we know any other fucking people's songs that we could do?"). It was a labor of love for someone, for Chase, I assume, who was a drummer in his youth before he cast himself into film school. It feels like someone's memories. Like looking through old scrapbooks.

The interesting thing is that he does not fall into the trap of telling a straight, narrative story. He lets it fall in pieces, rather, and, as in life, this means some ends never get tied up. Once the girlfriend's sister gets hauled off to the loony bin, we never see her again, not because the filmmaker forgot her, but because her life-line veered away from our hero's and how many people are frequent in your life for awhile then vanish and you think, years later, hey, whatever happened to...?

The movie starts on an English train, back when English people lived in black and white, where Keith Richards runs into his old mate Michael Jagger and they start talking American records. It's a meeting that's gone down in history, and from there, we switch to America and the origins of a less well-fated band. John Magaro is the suburban boy coming into his sex appeal just as Jagger is making it possible for a skinny boy with spots to pull the gorgeous birds, and his acting is subtle and endearing. He's the kid who doesn't trust the world's reactions, so plays everything close to his vest, afraid to react when the girl of his dreams makes an obvious pass, trying to smother his spontaneous smile when a music bigwig praises his songwriting. It's an underplaying that makes sense and pulls us in close, and he has the kind of naturally expressive face (huge eyes, easily flushing complexion) that communicates even when he's fighting against the communication.

Because it plays like a series of real memories, the characters rarely have the opportunity to engage us entirely, although the acting is good. The girlfriend, sympathetically played by Bella Heathcote, is alleged to have groupie tendencies, but seems so earnestly devoted to the hero that this judgment never quite rings true. This is symptomatic of the major flaw here: as when listening to someone tell their life story, it comes out in a jumble of bits which don't always make sense because of the necessary lacunae carved by missing information. It is certainly possible that the sluttishness of a sexually active girl largely existed only in the heads of the boys around her, and because this was not primarily her story being told, we never know for certain. It does matter, though, as the ending (if you can call it that. As in life, inconclusiveness rules the day) hinges upon the question.

James Gandolfini is about perfect as the second-generation Italian-American father frustrated and bewildered by the direction the world is taking ("You look like you just got off at Ellis Island," is the criticism he throws at his shaggy-haired, cuban-heeled, rock-singer son), and the scene in which he sits late at night watching the "Bali Ha'i" song from South Pacific, having forgone his final chance for happiness for the sake of familial duty, is truly heartbreaking. Chase is great with this kind of thing: no dialogue, letting the pictures and the music and the actors bring the emotion.

The camera gets to play, as well: on a lost night in Los Angeles after a party gone awry, our hero hitchhikes down an alien and forlorn street while the camera circles around him twice to show the threatening emptiness of the town, both metaphorical and otherwise, the approaching car, and, when it stops, the scary people inside. The framing device of the little sister writing the story in essay form doesn't really work, and her dance at the end is cornball embarrassing, but when you're making bold choices, you don't fall soft, and your ass hurts afterwards for awhile.

I am loathe to label it a failure, though, because it has so much life in it, and so much energy and heart, and it's still ringing around inside my head. If it is a failure, it's a fascinating one.