The Last Days of Disco

Disco may suck, but this evocation of the much maligned period from Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona) deserves a turn on the dance floor. It's "the very early '80s," and meek and vulnerable Alice (Chloë Sevigny, playing a role with uncomfortable parallels to her victim in Kids) and her roommate, the not so sweet Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale in the Parker Posey part), are recent Hampshire College graduates scraping together a living in a Manhattan publishing house. Their nights they spend at an exclusive, unnamed disco dancing and meeting men -- among them "dancing ad man" Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), who sneaks in agency clients much to the chagrin of his friend Des (Stillman perennial Chris Eigeman), one of the club's managers, a womanizer and covert cokehead. Then there's Josh (Matt Keeslar), a fledgling DA with a bipolar problem whose love of disco has an ulterior motive, and Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), a corporate lawyer with a love of Scrooge McDuck and a penchant for sadistic honesty.

Mixing and matching, our heroes display callow treachery and tenderness as they fumble between community and nebulous independence. As ubiquitous as the tunes of Donna Summer and Blondie on the soundtrack is Stillman's effervescent dialogue: he's the Jane Austen of the urban bourgeois demi-monde. These Last Days might not be apocalyptic, but they're no one-night stand, either. At the Nickelodeon and the Janus and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough