Personality Crisis: One Night Only

          
Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi's Personality Crisis: One Night Only is both a concert film and a survey of David Johansen's musical career. The singer, in his Buster Poindexter guise, performs his own compositions, some dating back to his early days as a New York Doll. Johansen is backed by an overly tasteful quartet and is only in middling voice. 

However, as a raconteur, Johansen has few living peers. He traces his love of music to his opera loving Dad in Staten Island. In reaction, young David embraced Rhythm and Blues. He provides incisive sketches of those artists whose work gave his own career its impetus including Charles Ludlam, Charlotte Moorman, Harry Smith, and Hal Willner. The filmmakers interweave the songs and Johansen's patter with clips that illuminate the cultural petri dish of Post World War 2 New York. One that helped germinate Johansen's talents. Personality Crisis... is just one of many Scorsese documentaries that lovingly chronicle 20th Century New York City to rousing effect.

The film begins by filling the screen with a number of Post-Impressionist paintings featuring the demimonde of Paris. This is the historical antecedent to Post World War 2 New York, which succeeded Paris as the center of the avant-garde. It also provides a visual link to the performance site in the film , the swanky Club Carlyle in Gotham. The club is filled with colorful murals from the brush of Ludwig Bemelmans, most renowned for the Madeline series of books for children. Johansen remains very much a child of the demimonde, always on the periphery of mainstream celebrity. He even refers to his most commercially successful single, a cover of Arrow's "Hot, Hot, Hot", as the bane of his existence.

Personality Crisis... is a dignified portrait of an aging dandy. Johansen has always been a cult artist, more well known among the music cognoscenti than the general public. His lounge lizard doppelganger, Buster Poindexter, is more famous than he is. For those relatively ignorant of his work, the flick provides a good introduction to this playful musical artist and composer. For longtime fans, Personality Crisis... is an ideal matching of filmmaker and subject. The film captures a man who is, as longtime champion Paul Nelson put in faux Brooklynese, a genuine poisonality.