Oprah Movie Club Pick for June: Johnny Suede

1991 movie

Rating: 16/20 (Mark: 18/20)

Plot: The titular wanna-be teenage idol is missing that little special something to complete him. Luckily for him, that something--a pair of black suede shoes--lands on top of a phone booth he is using. As he works to get his band going, he juggles a relationship with a woman who already has a creepy photographer boyfriend, another relationship with a teacher of special needs students, and chicken-eating time with albino rock star Freak Storm.

Here are some of director Tom DiCillo's memories of making Johnny Suede which I found interesting. One of the things I really like about this movie is that it's a classic example of a director doing a whole lot of cool things with not a lot of money. Link Wray's guitar during the opening credits automatically sets this great mood, the kind of music that--for me at least--gives the story this almost timeless quality, and then it almost clashes with this weird cheap post-apocalyptic world littered with Christmas decorations, one where people go to discotheques with underpants on their heads and lizards roam freely the landscape of a pompadoured young man's subconscious. Johnny's sort-of nightmare fairy tale world is like a slightly less-sinster, wackier, and more comedic David Lynch world. Not that David Lynch's movies aren't funny. Johnny Suede is just more overtly funny, I think.

I do think this movie is hilarious, and since you could get away with calling it a romantic comedy, I'd say it's one of the more satisfying and funniest examples of the genre. Nick Cave's offer of chicken is one of those scenes that makes me laugh a little bit while I'm typing about it. I also loved the scene where Darlette doesn't like Johnny's Ricky Nelson single and asks if he's got anything else. He says he does and flips the record over. She asks for Freak Storm (believe it or not, that's only the second coolest name in the movie), he gets irritated and criticizes the plant she gave him ("Why would I give you a dead plant?"), she leaves, he catches Flip Doubt (there's the coolest) peeking through a curtain, he runs after her, she's just waiting in the shadows downstairs anyway, he says he's going out, she asks him if she can wait until he gets back and then goes upstairs, he ponders the situation, and then Ricky Nelson starts playing again. That is a little bit of comedy genius, such a well-written little joke that also manages to add a little bit to the pair of characters. The long scene in which Deke and Johnny make a pros/cons list is also very funny. The "Sorry I rip you shit" picture that Yvonne's student made Johnny also cracks me up, but not as much as Pitt's reaction to first his reading and then Keener's explanation. And for whatever reason, I just love this dialogue:

Deke: "When we gonna get the band started?"
Johnny: "I just told you, man--as soon as we get a gun."

Oh, and there's this one:

Darlette: "With those shoes on, you remind me of a prince in a fairy tale."
Johnny: "Yeah, well with that pink dress, you remind me of a strawberry ice cream cone."

So romantic. But with a lesser cast, this wouldn't have worked. The dialogue, which is admittedly dopey or corny, would have come across as nothing but dopey or corny. But I love the way the actors play it straight with this almost soap-opera delivery of the lines. Along with the aforementioned cheapness of the location, it gives the film this style that I really like--like a withered soap opera. I had seen Brad Pitt in a couple films before this one, and I was not impressed at all. When I saw this for the first time, I didn't get it and thought he was pretty awful here, too. But upon a second viewing, you don't need to look further than that opening scene where he's giving himself this look in the mirror to realize how good he is at creating this character, and he's about perfect as this naive man-child thing. He's got the look (and the hair apparently) to create this confident outer shell, this facade, but on the inside, he is fragile and gooey and really immature. He unfortunately reminds me of Hayden Christensen on Naboo during the "Suede is a funny thing" speech though, and I probably could have survived with less shots of Pitt in those ill-fitting and holey underpants. Alison Moir (Darlette) nails that soap opera actress thing, and she's cute as a button. And that accent? Oh, my--it'll melt you! If you look closely and are as perverse as I am, by the way, you can catch a brief nipple. Watching the scene where she comes to Johnny's pad for a date, gives him socks, and then announces that she has to go makes me think she should have had a great career playing characters in romantic comedies. And Catherine Keener? Any close readers of my blog (not sure I have any of those) know that I have a thing for Keener anyway. She's just so good here, something a little more real and human than the others. There's hurt there, a little confidence, a lot of fear, and this upperhand in this fledgling relationship with this new guy, and you can see it all in those wonderful eyes of hers. I love the look she gives Johnny after she and he share a "real kiss," and she's incredible in that "watermelon seed" scene. I'm not sure what's going on with her hair in this though. Calvin Levels is another who should have had a much bigger career after this. Hell, he could have been a Huxtable! He's good as Deke and has a great smile. Deke, by the way, was almost Steve Buscemi, but there's no way Buscemi would have been able to pull off that sweet spin move during the bands rehearsal in that freezing abandoned warehouse or wherever it was. And you've got Nick Cave who only needs to succeed at being a presence in this movie, stand out and draw attention to himself. He does that really well, and that whole scene with Johnny and Freak Storm in the alley is a lot of fun. You get Samuel L. Jackson in a very tiny but very cool role as Bebop, a badass with a standup bass. Love this dialogue:

Bebop: " I seen a cat cut half in two once."
Conan the accordionist (played by a potential Torgo Award winning Tom Jarmusch, brother of Jim): "You saw it happen?"
Bebop: "No, but I seen 'em put in two bags though."

And then the band plays, and they sound like they could have gone places if Bebop wouldn't have run off or if Deke or Johnny had more talent or if Conan the accordionist would have had a more prominent role. The original songs in this are a lot of fun, by the way. The song about eating a carrot for breakfast should have been a hit. "Never Girl" is great both before and after Deke "gasses up the tempo," and Freak Storm's "Mama's Boy" song is sad and beautiful. Oh, and the landlord's improvised "Hey, Hey, Today's the Day" is pretty wonderful, too.

There are a lot of little things that I like about Johnny Suede that really make it one of those movies that make it easy to overlook its flaws--you know, like the completely unnecessary narrator--and keep it on my list of movies that I'd call a sentimental favorite. There's the Terror in Tiny Town reference and Pitt's "Even the horses are midgets!" There's Peter McRobbie's pasty, lurking Flip Doubt who really does like he wandered off the set of Lost Highway or Blue Velvet. There's a great tiny performance by a guy named Ahmed Ben Larby as an angry taxi driver. I looked up his filmography. He's got only seven roles, but one of them (in The Cowboy Way with Woody Harrelson and Keifer Sutherland) is playing another taxi driver. And there's one of my favorite movie midgets (again, that's only for the alliteration, so calm down, little people) ever with Joseph Barry using an antenna to look at Catherine Keener's undergarments. I can identify, little fellow. Johnny Suede is the only feature-length film he's acted in, but he was Haley Joel Osment's stand-in for The Sixth Sense and he did stunts in The Royal Tenenbaums. And those three surreal dream sequences with lizards, exploding windows, a shot of a lizard and a gun that looks like it could have been a still from Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, a naked old guy? Far out.

But what's this movie about? Identity? Is it a coming-of-age story? There's a lot about time in this movie, and Johnny is almost an anachronism. "I'm not into now," he says. "Now is a fly's fart in the wind." Later, he claims that "Good music has no time." What's time do to characters like Johnny? There's also a lot of symbolism or possible symbolism in this movie, and I just don't get it all despite having seen this several times, twice in the last month. What do you think about the following?

--shoes--the "one thing missing"--shoes thrown and shoes lost?
--Johnny's guitar--what's that represent for the protagonist?
--the hairdryer that doesn't work
--the gun
--painting, the job that Deke and Johnny do really really well
--that hand he finds in the street and its twin on the "Be a bank teller" sign in the subway
--the plant that might have been dead when Darlette gave it to him
--the girlfriends themselves--what do Darlette and Yvonne represent for Johnny?
--signs--an exit sign and a "dead end" street sign in the background
--Johnny's puking after singing the song Freak Storm gave him (or was that just the chicken)

So, friends--what did you think of our Oprah Movie Club pick for this month?