Malin Akerman as Debbie Harry and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins as Iggy Pop. Photo Credit: XLrator Media
When I told a New Yorker friend who grew up going to punk shows in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s that the new CBGB movie — the eponymous CBGB, out this Friday — was awful, her response was simple.
“Honestly, what did you expect?”
CBGB, the grimy Lower East Side bar that launched the careers of some of the most influential punk rockers of all time, was a crucial thread of the cultural tapestry of 1970s and ’80s New York City. After years of documentaries and tributes to the now-shuttered landmark’s legacy, there’s little question that a scripted film about its lovable yet notoriously impractical owner Hilly Kristal was bound (and even deserved!) to be made. Unfortunately for all, it was this one.
Within the punk scene it birthed, the dysfunctional squabbling of Kristal’s family — both before and after his death in 2007 — is almost as legendary as the club’s monumentally gross bathroom. Their bitter feud about the CBGB brand (and its money) became part and parcel of its legacy, even as the venue itself wasted away, transplanting in 2006 and shuttering for good in 2008. Given that the Hollywood-polished movie made with the blessing of one half of the Kristal family and the condemnation of the other, it’s unsurprising that CBGB glosses over many of those messy realities and becomes a rose-colored caricature masquerading as true story.
Co-produced by Kristal’s daughter Lisa Kristal Burgman, the film chronicles the life of CBGB proprietor, played ably enough by a doleful Alan Rickman (or an Americanized Severus Snape – it’s often hard to tell). After failing to procure a business loan from a bank in 1969, Kristal instead borrows money from his mother Bertha (Estelle Harris) to open a bar in the barren wasteland of the East Village of the ’70s, with the help of hardhatted right-hand man Merv Ferguson (Donal Logue). Using comic-style animations and goofy sound effects, the movie traces the club’s history from its bleak biker-bar beginnings to the provenance of the punk-rock revolution.
A massive carousel of cast members wheel in and out of a film that is, in essence, a Hilly Kristal character study. There’s Idaho (Freddie Rodriguez), the violinist-turned-gadfly-junkie who represents the many drug addicts Kristal employed in his kitchen; Stan (Michael Massee), the overworked downtown cop who hovers around the bar and lets Kristal off the hook for noise complaints and other minor infractions; and Taxi, the homeless tech hired to work the CBGB sound board.
There’s Lisa Kristal herself, played by Ashley Greene in (obviously) the most positive light, as the boldly able college dropout who materializes when her father fails to help with tuition and martyrs herself by attempting to turn around his business’s finances. John Holmstrom (Josh Zuckerman) and Mary Herron (Ahna O’Reilly) — respectively the co-founder and writer of Punk, the first-ever punk magazine – act as heavy-handed narrators, waxing embarrassingly philosophical about the significance of the musical underground while charging down dank downtown alleys to the tune of Richard Hell and the Voidoids with a vigor that would make Aaron Sorkin proud.
And of course, there are the soon-to-be superstars that made CBGB legendary (or was it vice versa?). Talking Heads. Blondie. Iggy Pop. Lou Reed. The Dead Boys. The Ramones. Patti Smith. A cavalcade of stars flash across the screen like expensive end-credits peppered with endearing bloopers, each appearance more kooky and recognizable than the last. (And just in case you aren’t sure, each and every one is introduced with a wholly unsubtle animated nametag.) Even the Police make an appearance in the hastily-wrapped ending. The breakneck speed at which we meet each musician, hear three fan-service lines, and then lose them in the melee of the white noise of the crowd makes for a dizzying, almost parodic celebrity laundry list.
It’s the real history of the place, yes, but bundled into a jerky, consumer-friendly package that does everyone a disservice. To their credit, or perhaps their immense access, the filmmakers invited artists like the Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome to make on-screen appearances and used actual pieces of the club – the cash register, the entire bathroom, all dutifully preserved like museum artifacts they are – in the movie. But authentic props and cameos can’t stand in for a weak script, or compensate for the wholesale absence of important players in the club’s history.
Kristal’s ex-wife Karen, who technically owned CBGB and its liquor license for years and worked the door and bar, is pointedly absent from the film. (She refused to authorize her likeness after receiving none of her ex-husband’s $3.7 million fortune.) Instead, Merv takes over her role as well. Karen’s son — and Lisa’s brother — Dana is nowhere to be found for similar reasons; he’s been incredibly vocal about his objections since the film was announced.) These are typical Hollywood snags, of course, but their exclusion further narrows the perspective and reach of a film that is already hamstrung by selective memory.
The most disappointing part of this movie, however, isn’t just its sanguine script, its clown characters or its sycophantic epilogue (everyone lives happily ever after, hooray!). It’s the fact that, after all these years of watching the Kristal family bicker over rights and estates and properties, yanking CBGB in and out of existence for four decades, this is the film the public gets about such an undeniable creative hotbed in American history.
Rather than offering us emotional depth or connection to a deeply significant, clearly heartfelt moment in music history, CBGB gives us little more than a punk CliffsNotes at a time when even Anna Wintour has already done the reading. In lieu of an honest look at the circumstances that helped give birth to punk and the complicated man who helped make it possible, we get an time-softened, nostalgia-heavy encomium about a beloved saint (who bailed junkies out of jail and gave them jobs!) designed to extract the profit that the club’s owners were unable to make — or perhaps manage — when it was open.
As Ferguson points out, shrugging, in a moment of clarity that comes close to breaking the fourth wall: “Hey, art sucks.”
These 101 minutes of palatably zany rock and roll seem custom-built to solidify the CBGB brand – which exists today only as a redundant festival and a sea of horrible T-shirts – and attempt to regain control of a moment in time that was special and far more vital precisely because it was out of control. While you’d never know it from watching the film, the club went under in 2006 because the family was once again unable to make rent. Like much of what makes the story interesting, that fact gets swept under the rug in CBGB, even though it’s the most beautifully, tragically New York epilogue of all.
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