Personality Crisis: One Night Only (2022, Martin Scorsese & David Tedeschi) (Patreon)

52/100

I really do wonder just how much Scorsese actively contributes to his various co-directed docs. (He and Tedeschi previously collaborated on The 50 Year Argument; there's also A Letter to Elia, with Kent Jones. But even something like the George Harrison one, which has only Scorsese's name on it, seems likely to have been largely assembled by others. The man is busy.) Structurally, this portrait of David Johansen appeals to me—the archival footage and the contemporary interviews (conducted and shot by his stepdaughter, so don't expect anything revelatory) are studded throughout Johansen's January 2020 show at the Café Carlyle, featuring the goofy conceit "Buster Poindexter sings David Johansen." Comes across less expository than does your average music doc, though we're still getting pretty much a complete history, including such details as Morrissey having been president of the New York Dolls' English fan club. Best of all—in theory, at least—Scorsese and Tedeschi (and here I think Scorsese does deserve credit) virtually never interrupt the songs à la Summer of Soul...and on the rare occasions when they do, it's to juxtapose Johansen now with Johansen performing the same song decades earlier. Unfortunately (from my perspective, anyway), fully half of the set list for this show consists of tracks from the Dolls' 2006–2011 reunion albums, which I submit, admittedly solely on the basis of their lounge-lizard-esque representation here, are just not all that great. To my shame, I'm unfamiliar with Johansen's early solo work (i.e. between the Dolls and Buster; he adopted the latter persona when I was 19, showcasing it for a while on Saturday Night Live, so I'm very familiar with that), but I still perked right up for "Funky but Chic" and "Melody," which kick things off, and registered a comparative diminution of inspiration thereafter. As much as I admire the man and his relentless, sometimes genderqueer re-invention (it'd be easy to fashion something along the lines of Moonage Daydream for him), Personality Crisis lovingly memorializes one of his less creatively fertile periods.