MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Suede’ Takes a Walk in Dean’s Shoes

There’s no shortage of young movie actors who get compared to James Dean. But Brad Pitt, who plays the lead in Tom DiCillo’s charmingly offbeat debut film, “Johnny Suede” (Laemmle’s Sunset 5), is unique. Pitt’s performance not only suggests the star of “Rebel Without a Cause,” but all Dean’s star-struck imitators too. His acting captures the Dean gestalt. He gets the narcissistic self-caressing gestures, the studied soft murmur, the flurries of violence and resentment, the lazy twisted smile. More than anything, he conveys the comic essence of a young man trying to be James Dean.

Johnny Suede’s apparent idol is ’50 rocker Rick Nelson, and though he’s no travelin’ man or teen-age idol, he is a poor little fool, a New York rock hopeful living in spare squalor, dreaming of fame, penning soft pop ballads with titles like “The Never Girl.” In imagining Suede, who adopts his moniker after a pair of glitzy-glam black suede shoes literally fall on him from the sky, Pitt and DiCillo craft very cunningly a portrait of a wanna-be star drunk on stardom, a poseur trapped in poses.

The prime joke of the movie is that, while Johnny sometimes gets lost in his own dreams--as do we in two cases--reality is always smacking him in the face. His two closest companions, best buddy and keyboard man Deke (Calvin Levels) and girlfriend Yvonne (Catherine Keener), are realists, smarter and more practical than he. But they seem to like getting pulled into his soft, slow rhythms; they’re amused by his pretensions.

They play along with him as an affectionate adult might with a child. And Johnny’s is, metaphorically, a pop fairy-tale world. It has petulant princesses, ogres and evil midgets. Australian rocker Nick Cave even turns up as a false knight, the strung-out rocker Freak Storm, who feeds Johnny hypes, scams and bad fried chicken.

DiCillo worked as Jim Jarmusch’s cinematographer on “Permanent Vacation” and “Stranger Than Paradise,” but the comic-nightmarish quality of “Johnny Suede” seems far more influenced by David Lynch. Johnny’s piled-high mutant Elvis bouffant makes him looks like an Eraserhead James Dean and some of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, exteriors have the menacing German Expressionist feel Lynch often uses. It’s not empty pastiche, though. As in Pitt’s Dean-ish mannerisms, a personal vision comes through.

There’s something missing in “Johnny Suede.” High quality as it is, it feels somehow incomplete.” But, for a contemporary American low-budget movie, in the dog days of the early ‘90s, “Johnny Suede” has an astonishingly consistent tone and a remarkably talented and cohesive cast. They’re all good. Levels and Keener have a warmth and presence, that, in Keener’s case, suggests the young Zohra Lampert. Fine also are Alison Moire as pop siren Darlette, Tina Louise as her lush mother, the ubiquitous Sam Jackson in a bit as bassist B-Bop, and Michael Luciano as a bully landlord who dourly sings Johnny “The Rent Song.”

Like good New York rock, “Johnny Suede” mixes up cynicism, hard edge and compassion and, if you get on its oddball wavelength, it should have you smiling almost continuously. As Pitt catches Johnny’s James Dean- malgre-lui look, the movie catches Johnny’s phony stardust. It becomes a goofy, lyrical portrait of a sweet fake and loser, a man who has to lose his shoes to find himself.

‘Johnny Suede’

Brad Pitt: Johnny Suede

Catherine Keener: Yvonne

Calvin Levels: Deke

Nick Cave: Freak Storm

A Vega Film presentation of a Balthazar Pictures/Arena Films/Starr Pictures production, released by Miramax Films. Director/Screenplay Tom DiCillo. Producers Yorman Mandel, Ruth Waldburger. Executive producers Waldburger, Steven Starr. Cinematographer Joe DeSalvo. Editor Geraldine Peroni. Costumes Jessica Haston. Music Jim Farmer. Production design Patricia Woodbridge. Art director Laura Brock. With Alison Moire, Tina Louise. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (Language, sensuality).