One-Trick Pony

One-Trick Pony
October 3, 1980
Warner Bros.
Drama, Musical
VHS
B-

Although this is a melancholy, relatively realistic movie, it is no more the biography of Paul Simon than Can't Stop the Music is the biography of the Village People.  Yes, Simon wrote the script; yes, his nine- or ten-year-old son Harper plays his character in the opening flashback; and, yes, members of his real band play the movie band.  But 39-year-old Simon wasn't 34-year-old Jonah Levin; he wasn't a one-trick pony, a one-hit wonder who'd done nothing popular since the '60s.  This is more like a parallel-universe Simon, if he were unsuccessful but still needed to perform, in this case mostly on the road, despite the strain on his family life.  (The scenes with son Matty are all good.)  The negative view of the music-business world may be Simon's though.  Certainly he was at a crossroads then, although his songs, the title track and others, are under-rated in his portfolio.  There's a moment when we see the new wave of New Wave sweeping away Simon's relatively simple sound, when his band gets a tepid response and then the crowd goes wild for the B-52s performing "Rock Lobster."  (Their "Dance This Mess Around" was in Roadie.)

It's hard to make an entertaining movie about a protagonist who's depressed, and it doesn't help that the dialogue wasn't recorded with the same care and attention as the music.  It was a relief when always articulate 36-year-old Harry Shearer made a welcome return to my movie collection (27 years after Abbott & Costello Go to Mars), as Bernie Wepner.  Simon wasn't this subdued in Annie Hall, he was mellow but he wasn't mumbling.  I couldn't even hear Blair Brown half the time, except when she yelled at him.

This is obviously one of the 1980 movies where the '60s are reassessed, and there's a scene whose dark humor has only increased with time: Jonah and the band listing dead rock & rollers. When Jonah says there must be someone English on the list, it's like CStM not knowing about AIDS; OTP doesn't know who'd be shot a couple months later.  (Simon's "The Late Great Johnny Ace" would pay tribute to John Lennon, leading to a strange moment in the reunion concert with Art Garfunkel, which I'll discuss when we get there.)

Besides the B-52s, other musicians appear as themselves.  And Merv Griffin is one of the a cappella singers.