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THE LOVELESS: WAY BEYOND TORN UP

If you're in the NYC area next week (Sep 25/6/7/8), the first annual Motorcycle Film Festival kicks off with a CineMeccanica screening of a personal favorite, Kathryn Bigelow's ‘The Loveless' (Wed. Sep 25th).  Here's my review of a film I've seen perhaps 25 times, mostly at an age when style icons like Willem Dafoe's 'Vance' left a deep impact.

The Loveless remains much as its title suggests – unloved and unknown outside a core few who consider it an amazing motorcycle film.  The first-time feature for Kathryn Bigelow, who went on to earn two directing Oscars for her meditations on US/Middle East relations (The Hurt Locker and Zero DarkThirty), The Loveless bombed at theaters when released in 1981, but showcased Bigelow’s genius twenty years before the Academy realized who they were dealing with.

Willem Dafoe on a c.1955 Harley Panhead 'Hydra Glide'

Ms Bigelow, who co-directed with Monty Montgomery, had clearly studiedKenneth Anger shorts during her film school days, as The Loveless is a visual homage to Anger’s uncanny eye; he understood better than anyone at time - and schooled generations of filmmakers and ad men – that the cine-camera has the power to transform any object into an Icon.  While Scorpio Rising brewed up a mind-altered gay/Satanic/biker bacchanal (fueled by the first explicit use of powdered amphetamine in a biker film), Anger’s raw honesty (these were his gay biker buddies in real life) is locked and loaded in Bigelow’s hands for a shotgun blast at Happy Days (the #1 TV show at that time) and Reagan-era lobotonostalgia. 

The Gang: Lawrence Matarese as LeVille, Danny Rosen as Ricky, and composer Philip Kimbrough as Hurley

The storyline is a Southern highway collision of Easy Rider with the Wild One, upping the ante on both films with talk of jailhouse ‘joybangs’, andFaulknerian family drama.  The film opens with WillemDafoe as Vance, in his first big screen role (after being fired from Heaven’s Gate!), an intimidating, greasy, and ultrasexy biker sleeping like Satan in the wilderness, right beside his Panhead.  

The late NYC novelist Tina L'Hotsky as Sportster Debbie: 'Do I look affected?'

‘I wasn’t going to be no man’s friend today’, the movie begins, and he shortly proves his point when encountering the mythic Thunderbird fromAmerican Graffiti  - with, appropriately, a flat tire – complete with a round-heeled beauty waiting for a Real Man to rescue her.  Vance is a real man all right, and sees through George Lucas’ cliché-laden script, taking his payment from the Thunderbird goddess in a way we don't see coming.