Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll

Before Bogosian put his rogues' gallery onstage a year ago, he toyed with the idea of titling it Conflicts and Meditations on My State of Mind in America in 1990. Instead, he settled on Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. Wise move, and it's not a bogus come-on either. The show opens with a mood-setting blast of hard rock. Then, in monologues ranging in length from five to fifteen minutes, Bogosian brings to life ten characters who thrive on high decibels and higher risks. He's as confused as the rest of us about how to reconcile the allure of rock culture with the consequences of AIDS, addiction and greed. What's startling is the clarity that Bogosian brings to complex issues through his talents as a writer and a performer.

Having seen Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll onstage, I was skeptical at first that a movie could capture the galvanic current between actor and audience that you get in a solo live performance. The problem is apparent from the first sequence, a brilliant monologue in which Bogosian impersonates a junkie panhandling on a subway. Just released from jail on Rikers Island, he limps in with a cane, holding an empty paper cup, and hands the captive passengers a sob story about why he needs money for drugs. The plea is followed by a veiled threat. "I could be holding a knife up to your throat right now," he says. "I don't want to be doing that."

In the theater, this vignette charges you with the same mix of dread and guilt you'd feel if you were on that subway car. So effective is Bogosian's re-creation that as he moves among the front rows shaking his cup, some members of the audience actually drop in coins. Onscreen, though, it's not him and us anymore. It's us watching him and them. The camera adds distance and protection. We still get the point, of course, but we don't squirm.

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll is less thrillingly in-your-face than it was onstage; more disturbingly, one of Bogosian's most devastating monologues didn't make the final cut. In it, a rap-spouting killer imagines himself a bored God, taking vengeance on the world and sprinkling a new disease on homosexuals just to "fuck 'em up." But the film still has the power to stir heated debate. Bogosian is fortunate to have director John McNaughton as a collaborator. McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer drew Bogosian's admiration for its psychologically perceptive approach to a sensational subject. McNaughton achieves maximum effect with minimal artifice in a way that recalls Jonathan Demme's film of Spalding Gray's monologue Swimming to Cambodia. If you want to see how Bogosian's material can be sabotaged with tricky camera work and flashy editing, check out Oliver Stone's self-conscious movie version of Bogosian's lacerating play Talk Radio.

With the invaluable help of cinematographer Ernest Dickerson -- who has shot all of Spike Lee's films -- McNaughton develops a specific cinematic approach for each monologue. The camera moves sharply in rhythm with the ravings of a character torn apart by hatred of "all those big-boobed blondies who laughed at me when I asked them for a date." Or the camera floats along with a pothead who spins theories about how computers are out to kill us all through microwave ovens ("You're gonna be ashes, man").

Using a backdrop of sheet metal and chain-link fence, production designer John Arnone imbues the stage with the creepy feel of an urban jungle. Editor Elena Maganini, who worked with McNaughton on Henry, adds to the seamless flow with unobtrusive cuts. The goal is to emphasize what Bogosian has to say without drowning him out.

If the technical constraints of putting Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll on the screen hampered Bogosian in any way, you can't tell from the film. He prowls the stage like a champion boxer and lands every punch. Bogosian is an electrifying performer who matches physical dexterity with the comic authority of a master satirist. Without help from makeup or costumes (it's slacks and shirt throughout), he can transform himself from a shuffling derelict whining sagely about the pollution caused by "piss and shit and soapsuds and tampons and puke" to a preening stud extolling the virtues of his "long, wellshaped prick -- the kind girls die for."

But Bogosian goes deeper than razorsharp mimicry. His incisive writing catches the alarming contradictions of how we live without descending into polemics. "The really insidious thing about drugs," says an English rocker, "is that you're having such a good time, you don't realize what a bad time you're having." Later, as an American substance abuser, Bogosian cheerfully tells about the time he and his pal Frankie got wasted at a stag party and nearly got killed by picking a fight with some Hell's Angels. "Frankie's gonna live until the day he dies," he says, raising his fist in salute. "Rock on, man, no surrender."

In Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, the cry of "Rock on" has dark implications. The rampant excess pulls us up short. But so does a world deprived of daring. In the final segment, Bogosian is a pot-smoking artist who's stopped making art because he fears the system. He sees the homeless as the system's warning to "stay in your cage, don't rock the boat." So he retreats. "I want to paint a painting, I want to write something, I do it in my head where they can't see it," he says. "If they ever knew what I was thinking, man . . . I'd be dead." The sequence underscores what is most unnerving about Bogosian's vision of the world as a house of mirth and madness. You can't laugh it off.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 612

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(Posted: Apr 11, 2001)