Watching Get Crazy (1983) I kept wishing that I had grown up in a world where a middle-aged Lou Reed was an idol to teenagers everywhere. I’ve seen few films that are as cool as Allan Arkush’s Get Crazy. When one stops and considers just how cool this movie is it’s pretty incredible (I don’t use the word “cool” lightly either). One the one hand you have a theme song played by Sparks, you’ve got Adrian Belew’s song Big Electric Cat as the drug theme, you’ve got Malcolm McDowell conversing with his talking penis, Lou Reed ad-libbing a song in the back of a taxi, Dick Miller playing a dad, Mary Woronov, and Robert Picardo going bonkers in a foreman costume. It literally can’t get any cooler than that unless the movie is Gemlins 2: The New Batch (1990).
Arkush didn’t imagine Get Crazy as a broad satire of Dick Clarke and the music industry originally. The film was intended to be a serious drama set on the backstages of rock shows; something more akin to Song To Song (2017). But just because Arkush had to reimagine the film as a Mad Magazine spectacle doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Despite a plethora of fantastic elements the parodies are all really spot-on and honest. Arkush has a gift for grounding even the most far fetched gags in truth which is one of the reasons why his early film Hollywood Boulevard (1976) works so well.
Malcolm McDowell gives the best Mick Jagger performance of Jagger’s career and it’s a riot. And there’s the running gag where King Blues keeps recognizing his songs in other performers’ sets reiterates the cultural appropriation that defines rock and roll. Both elements are pure, albeit manic, genius and represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how many solid jokes are in Get Crazy. Daniel Stern is really good in this to as sort of the everyman center of the storm.
It’s criminal that Get Crazy isn’t available in a restored format. The copy I saw was a DVD bootleg of a videotape. Luckily the quality was pretty good and the soundtrack still sounded sharp. And what a soundtrack too. The eighties is an unsung golden age for rock soundtracks and Get Crazy easily cracks my top three. This is a must see for everyone.
