Party Monster
Any Hollywood hack can make an audience care about a conventional movie hero. Making us care for Michael Alig - party-promoting doyen of the club-kid scene in late-'80s Manhattan, murderer of his drug-dealing roommate Angel Melendez, proudly thought-free twerp - is several measures more difficult. To do that, you need a subtle script, deft performances, and a directorial style that conjures up nuanced sympathies where seemingly none can be found.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato fail on just about every count in ``Party Monster,'' their amateurish, absurdly arch retelling of Alig's rise and fall. The duo made an identically titled 1997 documentary on this topic, but where that film delivered the facts (plus a few controversial ``dramatic reenactments''), the new ``Monster'' is all gaseous atmosphere. It takes some doing to make a potentially epic cultural moment seem smaller than life, but Bailey and Barbato have pulled it off.
Chief among the film's train-wreck curiosities is the casting of Macaulay Culkin as Alig. Far from establishing the former ``Home Alone'' irritant as a grown-up actor, ``Monster'' makes the case that Culkin may never be ready for prime time. Alig arrived from Indiana in the early 1980s ready to be the next Andy Warhol (the original was still alive, if not for long), and Culkin plays him as a lisping wet noodle of ambition. The film's central irony is that Alig became a nexus of Manhattan high life while remaining a giggly blank slate, but Culkin doesn't have the craft to give the emptiness any dramatic weight. All he offers are duck lips and attitude.
Seth Green, at least, busies up the screen as James St. James, author of the film's source memoir ``Disco Bloodbath. '' There are knowing meta-winks tossed around about James being the real star of the movie, and Green certainly holds the screen in a series of increasingly outre outfits - his face paint changes by the scene - but you still get the sense of an overly clever straight young actor playing at being a drag queen. It's a tough line to walk: Alig, St. James, and their crowd specialized in airy, bitch-camp posturing, so are the actors being true to that, or are they adding just another level of noncommittal brattiness?
``Party Monster'' is packed with familiar faces - Wilmer Valderrama of ``That '70s Show'' plays Alig's lover DJ Keoki, Wilson Cruz (``Party of Five'') is the unlucky Angel, ChloĆe Sevigny is a sub-Edie Sedgwick hanger-on, and Dylan McDermott plays eye-patched Limelight owner Peter Gatien, acquitted in 1998 of charges that he allowed drug dealing at his clubs but was ordered deported to his native Canada last month. Marilyn Manson shows up as Alig's prize freak, and Diana Scarwid (``Mommie Dearest'') sounds the one note of authentic dementia as Alig's Teutonic mother, doting on her ``little cahndy mahn.''
``Prison isn't all that different from a nightclub,'' comments Alig toward the end. Funny; this movie isn't all that different from prison.
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