High fidelity

Allison Anders's bittersweet Sugar Town

by Peter Keough

SUGAR TOWN, Written and directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss. With Ally Sheedy, Rosanna Arquette, John Taylor, John Doe, Jade Gordon, Lucinda Jenny, Beverly D'Angelo, Martin Kemp, Larry Klein, and Michael des Barres. An October Films release. Opening the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema at the Brattle Theatre next Thursday, April 15.

People aren't nice. Just look at our elected officials, or the sad sacks inhabiting many movies of late, especially those by so-called independent filmmakers. And they don't get much nastier than in the film/music/entertainment Los Angeles nexus that is the setting of Allison Anders's mordant, funny and humane Sugar Town.

Anders meanderings Allison Anders -- one of the few enduring women directors, with such efforts as Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca, and Grace of My Heart -- is driving in LA and talking on a cell phone. The transmission is erratic, disconnected, broken up on occasion -- much like the lives of the characters of Sugar Town (written and directed with Kurt Voss, her sometime significant other), the opening film of this year's Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema. Set in the Los Angeles rock-and-roll demi-monde, featuring men and women striving for success or just peace with a partner, Sugartown is familiar ground for a director whose first film, Border Radio (1987), featured punk rockers including X band member John Doe, who's back again here along with former Duran Duran member John Taylor. "I did a series for Sundance channel called Docs That Rock," Anders says through a firestorm of static. "I interviewed John Taylor on Ziggy Stardust because he's a real fan and knew a lot about David Bowie. And it kind of all came together. We made this movie with John Doe all those years ago when we had no money and no experience -- why don't we just do that again?" The result is a genial but unglossed portrait of artists and wanna-be artists, including Taylor as a washed-up musician whose band had been hot a decade ago and who seeks a comeback. Not so big a stretch, perhaps. "There's a little bit of the actors in their characters," admits Anders. "Like John Taylor having to say a line like, `Yeah, we were pretty big in our day.' " More to the point are the relationships, which emphasize the virtues of understanding and forgiveness. "I particularly love how it resolved with Rosanna [Arquette, who plays the wife of Taylor's character] and John." Their marriage is disrupted when a former groupie deposits her young son on their doorstep and claims he's the father. "They had such a good chemistry with each other, and pretty quickly she was out of `You fucked someone else' mode to `We've got this child, what do we do with him?' " That kind of practical and compassionate -- in a word, female -- attitude distinguishes Anders's film, especially compared to the more vituperative takes on human folly indulged in by the likes of Neil LaBute or Todd Solondz. It's not a point of view much encouraged in the film industry. "There's a kind of sexism that's much more insidious than just giving girls a shot at calling, `Action,' " says Anders. "If you're telling a story about rape or abuse that's from a female perspective, people are scared of it. Not audiences, but the people who control the money. They'll let guys do whatever the hell they want. They can have any dark subject and nobody gets redeemed or healed or anything and that's fine with them. But they're scared of truly getting inside a woman's head." As in a film that Anders has been long been trying to make, Paul Is Dead. "It's about a young girl in 1969 who tries to escape her abusive home life. The `Paul is dead' rumor is going around, and she develops this fantasy that she's carrying on a relationship with the dead Paul McCartney. She has a psychosomatic pregnancy. And she ends up in mental hospitals and stuff. "And it's all true, it was all me. I was that girl. So that's my dream project. People think that it's the best script that I've written. But they're scared of female fantasy. They were, like, what's it going to look like? Are you going to have unicorns and stuff like that? I said, no! Paul McCartney is going to take me shopping. And my stepfather's beating the shit out of me. They're scared of what that looks like, the scary female imagination."

Unlike, say, the victims and perpetrators of Neil LaBute's Your Friends & Neighbors last year, these are not grotesques to be dismissed with cynical laughter. Neither are they the saccharine caricatures too often depicted in Ron Howard's recent EDtv. Anders's characters are people you wouldn't mind spending time with, and in some cases there might not be any choice -- the shock of self-recognition arrives regularly in Sugar Town. In its honesty, authenticity, exultant humor, and compassion, the film is an apt opening entry for the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema, which has always celebrated reconciliation rather than rancor.

Relationships take a back seat to career for fading rock star Clive (former Duran Duran heartthrob John Taylor, making an endearing acting debut) -- or would if his car weren't already packed with the aging rockers resembling extras from Spinal Tap that he's thrown together for his hoped-for comeback band. They're en route to find out whether their manager has gotten funding for a new CD of their godawful rap "fusion" music, and the news isn't good. Things aren't much better back home, where Clive's wife, Eva (Rosanna Arquette, matured but still fiery), has just been offered a role playing Christina Ricci's mother. Neither do they improve when a new-agey woman comes to their door to deliver her son "Nerve," a pre-adolescent wildcat with cadmium-yellow eye make-up whom she claims Clive fathered back in the good old days.

Meanwhile, up-and-coming songstress Gwen (Meg Ryan look-alike Jade Gordon) is showing how dreams come true '90s style. When she's not terrorizing her junkie songwriter into finishing a Fiona Apple-type tune about a girl in a mental hospital, she's playing All About Eve with neurotic Hollywood production designer Liz (Ally Sheedy, as comically sharp as she was dramatically deep in High Art), blithely sabotaging Liz's life and picking up the pieces for her own use. Amid that detritus is Clive's manager, with whom Gwen negotiates a deal that would put Monica Lewinsky to shame. Others in Sugar Town have more respect for family values, notably John Doe (he seems the least comfortable and convincing in the cast) as a studio musician who's reluctantly opted for a tour with a salacious Chicana pop star (an unfortunate lapse into stereotype) interested in more than his guitar chops. He needs to support a household of hungry mouths, including a bunch of pigs, a passel of kids (Doe's own, and they're great), a wife (Lucinda Jenny, nurturing but randy), and a recovering addict brother with designs on his sister-in-law.

Sordid, yes, but not beyond redemption -- with the possible exception of Gwen, who's young and will learn. With 30 significant characters (all memorable, especially Beverly D'Angelo in a brief turn as a potential wealthy backer, a brassy broad who doesn't mind admitting that she got where she is on her back), the interlinking plot lines, and the pop-music background, comparisons to Robert Altman's Nashville are inevitable. Anders, though, has none of Altman's bite, artistry, or bile, which means her characters have a chance at a happy ending. Not that she doesn't pay due attention to the odds against them -- the drugs, greed, heartlessness, infidelity, deceit, malice, and bad taste that some filmmakers celebrate with hip cynicism and voyeurism, others with cheap melodrama and moralism. But Anders looks on with knowing tolerance, a non-condescending clarity that implies a better way. There's irony and perhaps a little shock value intended when it's said about one of Clive's colleagues, "You know what he thinks about having sex with adults," or when John Doe announces he's off to rehab as if it were one more errand to run, like going to the grocery store. But when these benighted heroes and heroines actually do turn their lives around, sort of, it's for real -- not just a sugar coating.