It’s still a musical in a radical vein

BOB FOSSE may not have reinvented the movie musical with 1979’s “All That Jazz,” but he warped it to his purposes in a way that could never quite be repeated.

Midway through the film, a critic weighs in on the Fosse alter ego’s latest movie, accusing him of “trying too hard to please.” But the curious thing about “All That Jazz,” released this week in a new “music edition” (with copious extras including brief documentaries and a singalong track), is that the film does not entertain so much as exert a morbid fascination. This is not a movie that seeks the approval of the audience -- something that can’t be said of film musicals in general and certainly not of “Dreamgirls” or even “Chicago,” a strenuous attempt to channel the Fosse style.

As a choreographer, Fosse was a master of subtlety and precision. But as a filmmaker he was more interested in the roiling mess of psychological realism. “All That Jazz” is a bravura feat of narcissism -- an obsessive biopic directed by the subject himself. It’s as strange and squirm-inducing an act of autobiography as has been perpetrated in any form or genre. The open heart surgery that just about stops the film dead in its tracks is a neat summary of its methods.

The movie plunges headlong into the manic, multitasking existence of choreographer-filmmaker Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a barely disguised version of Fosse. He’s in rehearsals for a new Broadway musical and trying to finish editing a film about a stand-up comic (the real-life parallels are Fosse’s 1975 production of “Chicago” and his 1974 Lenny Bruce biopic, “Lenny”).

The repeated sequences of Gideon’s morning ministrations, scored to jittery blasts of Vivaldi, set the tone. He takes a shower, cigarette in mouth, gulps down some Dexedrine and greets himself in the mirror with an almost gruesome “It’s show time, folks!” Playing the role of tortured artist all too well, Gideon is very much the self-absorbed center around whom everyone else orbits, whether it’s adoring starlets or alarmed money men or the mostly neglected women in his life. Among those competing for his attention are a current lover (Ann Reinking), an ex-wife (Leland Palmer), an adolescent daughter (Erzsebet Foldi) and a hallucination who seems to be the angel of death (Jessica Lange).

Fosse’s concern for realism results in some interesting staging choices. Through the film’s first half, the musical numbers flow organically in and out of a sweaty rehearsal context, most memorably in the opening cattle-call audition set to George Benson’s “On Broadway.” The turning point is Gideon’s heart attack during a superbly staged and rhythmically edited read-through sequence: The sound cuts out and all we hear are his drumming fingers and the taps of a pencil.

The oft-cited model for this film is “8 1/2 “ (Fosse even used Federico Fellini’s regular cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno), but Fosse’s take on his own legend is less contemplative -- and less romantic. The grotesquerie of “All That Jazz” reaches a black-comic peak in the final musical number. Ben Vereen’s variety-show cheeseball ushers Gideon to his demise with a demonic, sped-up cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” in which the ballad’s sugary lost-love refrain -- “Hello, emptiness / I feel like I could die” -- becomes disturbingly literal. The film ends with a blindsiding parting shot: Gideon zipped into a body bag as Ethel Merman starts to warble “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Fosse would make one more film -- the tawdry “Star 80” -- before his death in 1987, but “All That Jazz” is the more fitting swan song. More than that, it was the brash, gaudy funeral he designed for himself.