In a month, Martin Scorsese is going to be 80 years old, and the fact that he goes back so far has always given him a special angle on the world of rock ‘n’ roll. From the start, he sought to look at rock and watch it age — first in “Mean Streets,” where some of the hypnotic rapture of the film’s soundtrack (mostly early-to-mid rock and soul nuggets 60s) is that it is a decade behind the film era (the early 70s). “The Last Waltz”, Scorsese’s first rock documentary, was an end-of-era elegy for the band and the counterculture mystique the band embodied – although Scorsese, when he shot it, never was only 34 and Robbie Robertson was 33. (They were already thinking like young old men.) “Shine a Light” was about the twisty side of the Rolling Stones’ sixties longevity, and “Public Speaking,” though not a rock doc, treated Fran Lebowitz like a rock star. of storytellers – as well as another subject matter, like the band or the stones, that synced up with Scorsese’s mythological take on aging but ageless boomer mavericks.

On this point, the moment seems propitious for “Personality Crisis: One Night Only», a Scorsese documentary on David Johansen, the New York doll became Buster Poindexter became the timeless icon of guttersnipe hipsterdom. Johansen, born in 1950, is a mere 72-year-old spring chicken, but he fits perfectly with Scorsese’s underlying rock ‘n’ roll obsession with watching former bad boy rebels as they grow older and, in a somewhat stiffer-joint fashion, continue to channel the electrified spirit of their youth. Any parallels between these artists and Scorsese’s own identity as the most rock ‘n’ rolliest movie makers, still cracking the whip in their golden years, are strictly intentional.

In “Personality Crisis”, you could say that David Johansen has three identities. He’s the lead singer of the Dolls (who reunited in 1971), a flamboyant, protruding, cross-dressing East Village punk-harlot, an American Mick Jagger with a more scruffy side. He’s Buster Poindexter, the tuxedo-clad cabaret-nightclub alter ego with the Cheshire Cat grin that Johansen first began appearing as in 1987, just in time for the ironic retro boom of the Reagan era. And then there’s Johansen behind the scenes – the straight-up Staten Island shooter who grew into a sophisticated autodidact, full of wry observations about the bohemian culture he’s spent 50 years weaving his way through.

Half of the film consists of a performance Johansen gave as Buster Poindexter in January 2020, just before the pandemic. Standing on stage at New York’s Cafe Carlyle, surrounded by the coffee society club’s chic murals (and by former downtown celebrities like Debbie Harry and Penny Arcade, who are in the audience), Johansen, looking like to a very sleazy Peter Dinklage, is now, one might say, closer to the artist Buster has always had in his heart – a faded nightclub “legend”. The pompadour stands just as tall, but now he thrives on long, styled hair, and he sports a John Waters mustache with a goatee, rose-tinted horn edges and a dark jacket with glitter patches and a cashmere handkerchief, without forget that voice, which is halfway between a croon and a gangster croak.

It’s Johansen who becomes Full Hipster – although one could argue that in the film, it’s actually his fourth identity. The Buster of the 80s and 90s was a concocted showbiz dandy who performed old standards in a threaded gravel voice. But in “Personality Crisis”, Buster only performs David Johansen songs, singing them in a plaintive rasp, and his parlor lizard persona is now a mix – we watch Johansen play Buster as he channels Johansen, almost flipping and in between.

Scorsese will dwell on one of Johansen’s paternal reminiscences, funny and revealing. The singer describes the intimidation of meeting Arthur “Killer” Kane when he knocked on Johansen’s fifth floor door in the Hell’s Angels block, and how the new hit “Hot Hot Hot” became “the bane of my existence”. (though I suspect it’s not the bane of his bank account). And it tells a big, sprawling story about how he bonded with Miloš Forman and almost launched a movie career by landing one of the lead roles in the big-screen version of 1980’s ‘Hair’ – until Galt McDermot, one of the show’s composers, smashed it all when he decided that Johansen couldn’t sing. The pattern will be followed by a number, and some of them are great, like “Melody,” the 1979 track that’s always been a standout Johansen song (it’s a Motown knockoff that makes it sound like that it could be an actual Motown single), which the singer here slows down to a wistful ballad.

Then the film will return to Johansen’s explosive golden age: clips of the Dolls, in all their rogue majesty, performing on rock TV shows or Max’s Kansas City, or Johansen in the early 80s saying to Conan O’Brien what has to be the rudest anecdote ever heard about the formation of punk, or a good story about going to record a record at Todd Rundgren’s (“It sounded like the pagoda of a Cambodian drug lord”), or a section devoted to Johansen’s love of avant-garde musician Harry Smith or his early life with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company (it was Charles Ludlum who once introduced himself and said he had a “personality crisis”), or insight into how Morrissey got his start as the teenage president of Britain’s Dolls fan club.

When I saw Buster Poindexter in the late 80s, I felt like a little bit of him was going away. I always feel like that. Scorsese, who co-directed the documentary with David Tadeschi (the film’s editor), continues to go back and forth between full Buster numbers and clips from the past, but after a while the disco vibe Buster seems to slow down the film. “Personality Crisis” is two hours long and didn’t need to be. The film engages in engaging Scorsese fan fixation on Buster Poindexter, but Johansen’s story in the 70s and 80s could have been expanded. Johnny Thunders’ downward drug spiral may be old news, but it still feels like the movie overlooks it. Yet David Johansen is so winning, as a personality who seems to have transcended all crises, that you watch this film grateful to sink into his anecdotes of sage nostalgia, not to mention his life-is-a-make-believe wit. – the endurance of cabarets.