Party Monster (2002)

Too arch and nostalgic to condemn the excess-ridden era it recreates, yet too much the product of a 12-step recovery to skip the after-school piety completely, this mostly enjoyable faux-documentary fable displays the same strengths and weaknesses as the book on which it's based. In other words, Disco Bloodbath author James St. James is no better at wresting meaning from his gaudy heyday than any other memoirist. Portrayed brilliantly here by Seth Green as a ketamine-snorting Oscar Wilde in various states of drag and self-delusion, St. James guides the audience through a tour of Manhattan's rave-era nightlife, a period of relentless techno thump, endless pills, and outrageous stunts. Macaulay Culkin is less surefooted in the admittedly less interesting role of Michael Alig, a rave-era Eve Harrington who unwittingly orchestrates the cultural shift from celebrity-as-nightclubber to nightclubber-as-celebrity. Culkin never sounds as convincing mouthing the clever, outré aphorisms that Green intones so airily. Nevertheless, the pair breeze their way through Party Monster's first hour on the strength of the script's co-dependent banter and its giddy depictions of clubland grotesquerie. Given a national platform by nominally outraged talk show hosts, Alig metamorphoses into a fame-hungry pied piper who inspires a generation of small-town kids to move to New York armed with nothing but an appetite for drugs and a flair for self-promotion. Eventually, though, he turns to murder when his dealer has the nerve to expect payment for the mountains of cocaine Alig ingests. The constant stream of cameos -- from Dylan McDermott as Limelight owner Peter Gatien to Natasha Lyonne as a club-kid convert -- and the filmmakers' non-linear approach keep things interesting well into the retribution reel. In the end, though, Party Monster exhausts the audience's patience by indulging in the fruitless quest for perspective on events that took place less than a decade ago. A closer look at the absurd facts of the case (the police were too busy trying to bust Gatien for alleged drug trafficking to arrest Alig, who had confessed to the murder on television) might have served the material better than boring 20/20 hindsight. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide