Throughout his long career as America’s Greatest Living Filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has also pursued an often-fascinating as a documentarian, specializing on films about legendary musicians (The Last Waltz, Shine a Light, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Rolling Thunder Revue) and about the quirkier institutions of his beloved New York City, including his parents (Italianamerican), The New York Times Review of Books (The 50 Year Argument) and Fran Lebowitz (Public Speaking and Pretend It’s A City). With his latest project, Personality Crisis: One Night Only (which he co-directed with frequent collaborator David Tedeschi), he gets to combine the two with frequently delightful results.
His subject this time is David Johansen, who is revered in rock circles as the swaggering lead singer of the brilliant-but-short-lived glam rock band The New York Dolls and best known to the general public for the hit song “Hot Hot Hot,” which he recorded under his Buster Poindexter persona, and for playing the ghostly cabbie in Scrooged. The spine of the film is a concert that he performed as part of his residency at New York’s super-swanky Cafe Carlyle cabaret room on January 9, 2020, which happened to be both Johansen’s 70th birthday and just before clubs like that would be forced to close due to COVID-19. In between the songs—which mostly eschew his rockers for songs that he wrote as Johansen for the Poindexter persona (though pointedly not “Hot Hot Hot,” a tune he now clearly loathes)—we are taken on a tour of his life and career via some often amazing archival footage and new interviews conducted by Johansen’s daughter, Leah Hennessy.
In theory, Scorsese has his work cut out for him a little more than in his previous music docs since Johansen will obviously not be nearly as familiar to audiences as the likes of Dylan, Harrison or the Stones. However, unlike the more guarded likes of Dylan or Mick Jagger, Johansen is a raconteur of the top order and even when his patter between the songs during his performance seems only tangentially related to the music, he delivers it in such a drolly amusing manner than viewers at home will be eating out of his hand as much as the Carlyle crowd. In the off-stage interviews, the topics are a little more serious—including his involvement with the anti-war movement, things that he learned from roots music scholar Harry Smith and the ghosts of friends (including former band mates Billy Murcia and Sylvain Sylvain) that he has accumulated over the years—but he is no less forthcoming or insightful during these moments. Musically, he is still in fine form and even proves to still have the electrifying stage energy that he demonstrated in his Dolls days during a performance of “Personality Crisis” towards the end.
Obviously, if you are a fan of Johansen, Personality Crisis: One Night Only is a must but even if you come into it with no idea of who he is or what he has accomplished, you are more than likely to find yourself converted into a full fan by the time it ends.