CBGB hits sour note
Music drama strains for authenticity
There’s a comic-book feel to CBGB, a biography of the music club in New York where punk rock was born, and it’s not only because it’s structured like a graphic novel. Director Randall Miller, who wrote the screenplay with wife Jody Savin, presents scenes in panels and festoons the bleary Bowery atmosphere with words like “Slam!” and “Swoosh!” It’s as if the campy old Batman TV show had snorted some coke and turned homeless.
The air of unreality extends to the story itself. It tells the life of Hilly Krystal (not to be confused with the comedian who used to host the Oscars). Hilly — played by Alan Rickman with an air of hangdog depression that robs the film of any sense of musical discovery — started CBGB at the dawn of the punk revolution. Now closed, it was located near the Lower East Side, a rundown bar with a leaky roof, disgusting toilets, and dog poop all over the floor (Hilly’s pet, Jonathan, had famously unreliable bowels). The name stood for Country Bluegrass Blues: Hilly thought he was in at the dawn of a country music trend.
He hit it lucky, but he was such a terrible businessman that he barely scraped by. Meanwhile, a parade of famous names troops through the film: Lou Reed (Kyle Gallner), Iggy Pop (Taylor Hawkins), Debbie Harry (Malin Akerman) Patti Smith (Mickey Sumner) and more. The music is authentic, partially perhaps because Sumner is the daughter of Sting, who is also portrayed.
“There is something there,” Hilly would famously say as each of the soon-to-be-famous bands (The Ramones, The Dead Boys, et al) audition on CBGB’s rickety stage. It’s part of a familiar narrative: The hopeless dream becomes an overnight success, although in this case it’s somewhat blunted by Hilly’s habit of giving the local motorcycle club free beer and never paying his rent.
CBGB strains for authenticity — that’s the real club you see, reassembled from pieces that had been taken down and stored in Brooklyn — but the little chronological markers are pasted on, and you never feel the freshness. Here’s Nixon on TV, denying he was a crook (would anyone actually turn off that broadcast in the middle?); there’s the famous Ford To City: Drop Dead headline. Someone rushes into the club with the Village Voice review that helped establish its reputation. Mary Harron (Ahna O’Reilly) — the Canadian who helped found Punk magazine and would go on to direct American Psycho — drops clunky bon mots about the significance of punk rock (“It’s about the apocalypse.”)
CBGB is a parade of such moments and such bands, one after the other playing snatches of this or that early song as Hilly watches. Under Rickman’s pained gaze you wonder what he saw in the music, although when you hear it — Sting’s plaintive Roxanne, or Blondie singing a galloping version of the old 1960s hit Denise — it does take you back. There’s something there, but CBGB isn’t it.