It’s almost impossible to convey how amazing “Saturday Night Live” once was, how groundbreaking, radical, and daring. Even a lot of the sketches that bombed had an audacity to them that made you forgive the misfires. And the musical guests were from all over the artistic and genre map. Overly contrived pop star shock & awe tactics hadn’t become the norm, so artists who were truly pushing the envelope created seismic cultural shocks that would have tongues wagging for weeks.
That’s what happened in 1979 when David Bowie was the show’s musical guest and brought along Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias for backup vocal duty. Bowie’s well endowed puppet (brought out for the song “Boys Keep Swinging”) raised one eyebrow; Arias’ and Nomi’s genderfuck (in the way they dressed, moved and sang) raised the other. The puppet’s exposed dick might have garnered the most water cooler conversation, but Arias and Nomi were a close runner-up. What a lot of middle-America viewers didn’t know was that, with Nomi, they were watching a figure as complex and talented as Bowie, who would never earn pop stardom or his full due.
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For any student of pop culture, it’s a feast of rare performance footage, original interviews with former cohorts like Ann Magnuson and Kenny Scharf (filmed against pointedly cheesy, tongue-in-cheek backdrops), and clips from old sci-fi films and home movies. Yes, the “Saturday Night Live” footage with Bowie is there as well. Notably absent from the film is an interview with or commentary from frequent Nomi collaborator Joey Arias.
Slowly it dawns on you that you’re not getting much on the man behind the persona, very little on what his personal life was like. Horn has wisely saved that aspect until near the end, where he delivers an emotional sucker punch. As he cuts back and forth between footage of Nomi performing a cover of Marlene Dietrich’s melancholy signature tune “Falling in Love Again,” assorted interview subjects discuss Nomi’s crippling loneliness and the fact that he never achieved his desire to have a serious lover. (The film makes no mention of the fact that Nomi and Jean-Michel Basquiat were lovers, a relationship meticulously detailed in Phoebe Hoban’s book “Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art.”) It’s a respectful approach that is moving without being sensationalized, and reveals just how painfully human the space alien was at his core.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism,Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
