The King and His Court

Another rocker worthy of mention is Joan Jett, who starred in Paul Schrader's exhilaratingly creepy 1987 film Light of Day. In this bizarre little affair, Michael J. Fox, too short to rock and roll but too young to die, is cast as the lead guitarist in an unsuccessful Cleveland bar band called The Barbusters. Jett plays his sister, the lead singer in the band, who eventually defects to join a heavy metal band called The Hunzz, but ends up back in Cleveland. Thus, in Fox we have a very successful movie star who would probably like to be a mildly successful rock star playing a very unsuccessful rock star in a movie co-starring a moderately successful rock star (Jett) who would probably like to be a reasonably successful movie star but who is playing a very unsuccessful rock star. Fox is very unconvincing as a rock star, which would explain why he, after a less-than-triumphant tour of Erie, Pa., ends up back in Cleveland. But Jett, a good, real-life, second-tier rock star is very convincing as a rock star because she is a rock star, so her ending up back in Cleveland makes no sense whatsoever. For what it's worth, Joan Jett can act better than Michael J. Fox, but, then again, she can probably do a lot of things better than Michael J. Fox. Or Paul Schrader.

The only top-shelf rock star in history who has consistently done memorable work on the screen is David Bowie. Debonair, good-looking, talented, and blessed with a brain roughly twice the size of everyone who ever played in The Eagles combined, Bowie has managed to avoid the dismal roles that come quite naturally to the Adam Ants and Ringo Starrs. Perfectly cast as an anorexic extraterrestrial in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, he was superb as a wicked goblin in Labyrinth, icily mystifying as a British Army officer in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, cadaverously effective as an aging vampire in The Hunger, the only good thing in the pestilential 1986 musical Absolute Beginners and downright sympathetic as Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ.

With the exception of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Last Temptation, all of these films are victimized by serious artistic problems--_Labyrinth_ has too many Muppets, The Hunger has too few scenes with Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in bed together, Absolute Beginners has no script, and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence has an overbearing soundtrack, a weird plot line, and somehow manages to create the impression that Tom Conti has been airlifted out of Reuben, Reuben and into The Bridge on the River Kwai while Bowie has once again fallen to earth and has been unfortunate enough to land in a part of it occupied by the Japanese. Still, with the single exception of the absolutely atrocious Absolute Beginners, all of Bowie's films are worth watching, if only because of his unrehearsed strangeness. Bowie is the only rock star to have ever brought anything to the movies that the movies didn't already have. He is also the most enduring of the '70s great glamorous weirdos. There will always be a place in my heart for the Ziggster.

There will always be a place in my heart for David Byrne, as well, but it isn't really fair to call whatever the Talking Heads' lead singer is doing in True Stories "acting." And despite the coy charm of this condescendingly affectionate little film about a small Texas town, director Byrne must be taken to task for giving John Goodman one of his first starring roles, thus opening the floodgates to an era in which the tubby thespian has imposed the same brutal rule of law on the American film industry that Gerard Depardieu has long exerted in France: No movie gets made in this country unless I'm in it.

Before moving on to the final frontier of this essay, it would be unprofessional to overlook some of the better, if quickly forgotten, acting performances by rock stars in recent years, as well as some of the worst. Tina Turner was just swell in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Tommy, enlivening the proceedings with her own special brand of post-nuclear oompah, and Levon Helm, the dour, low-key drummer from The Band, was splendid as Sissy Spacek's low-key, dour poppa in Coal Miner's Daughter. Alice Cooper was useless as a piano-playing waiter in Mae West's unbearable 1978 swan song, Sextette, but certainly no worse than Arlo Guthrie in Alice's Restaurant, the interminable Arthur Penn movie based on Guthrie's interminable song of roughly the same name.

Phil Collins was passable as a good-natured Cockney train robber in the otherwise brainless Buster, mustering a kind of Grade-B Bob Hoskins bluff-and-bluster, which is about what one would expect from a man who started his rock career as a drummer in the world's fourth most pretentious rock band (try as they might, Genesis could never wrestle the top spots away from Pink Floyd, Yes, and The Moody Blues), and who now makes his money singing bland, recycled Motown tunes, and who is bald. Last but not least, John Doe of the very good L.A. punk band X was very bad in Great Balls of Fire! The film did not get an X-rating, but he should have.

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