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Down & Out With The Dolls

2003, Movie, R, 88 mins

Down & Out With The Dolls: Review

DOWN & OUT WITH THE DOLLS
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Writer-director Kirk Voss's third foray into the world of struggling musicians — his first without BORDER RADIO (1987) and SUGAR TOWN (1999) director Alison Anders — is more than a little reminiscent in tone and style of '80s artifacts SMITHEREENS and LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS: Scrappy, scruffy and more energetic than polished. The same could be said of the Paper Dolls, the all-girl Portland, Ore., band whose brief rise and ignominious fall it chronicles. Guitarist-songwriter Kali (Nicole Barrett) has a drummer — bisexual doper Reggie (Kinnie Starr) — and a bass player, Lavender (Melody Moore), but needs a lead singer to make the group a band. One appears fortuitously in the form of local celebrity Fauna (Zoe Poledouris, daughter of soundtrack composer Basil Poledouris) — or perhaps the word is opportunistically. Newly dumped by her pretentious bandmate boyfriend, Paolo (Mikael Jehanno), Fauna spots Kali hanging out with childhood pal Levi (musician Coyote Shivers), whose band, Suicide Bombers, look as though they're going to be the next big thing. Fauna's been kicking around the wrong end of the music business long enough not to let a connection go to waste. The newly formed Paper Dolls move in together, dub their rambling home the Dollhouse and start playing small gigs; Levi introduces them to Pop Up Records executive Bill Black (Alan Charing) and suddenly they've got a recording contract and an album in the works. But the tensions that will break up the band are present from the start: Fauna is a temperamental spotlight hogger, Reggie's more interested in smoking dope and getting laid than dealing with band business, Kali is thin-skinned and given to writing dippy songs about alienation that Fauna ruthlessly reworks into crowd pleasers. The film's liabilities include Lavender's monotonous voice-over and the ill-advised decision to start the story at the end, apparently with the idea of stirring up some straight-from-the-gate suspense. To be sure, everyone's fighting and someone is dead, but it's hard to care about the histrionics of strangers — the same scenes work much better when they come around the second time in their proper order, after you've gotten to know the players. The performances are rough and sometimes amateurish, but that works in the film's favor more often than it doesn't — there's none of the false slickness that comes with hot young stars playing rock 'n' rollers. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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