Perhaps encouraged by his brief appearances in the Rutles "All You Need Is Cash" and probably more pertinently Woody Allen's "Annie Hall", Paul Simon returned to the music industry five years after his last studio album with a new record and this film, which he wrote and acted in. I must admit I didn't see the latter coming, but at.least he doesn't set himself up as the director too.
Simon plays Jonah Levin, a one-hit-wonder with a folk/hippy anti-Vietnam war song from 1967, still on the road today with his band playing small clubs and hoping for a record deal for his new batch of songs. His personal life is a bit of a muck-up, separated from his too-long suffering wife Blair Brown who lives in New York with their kid son on whom he dotes, we first see him in a very Woody-type situation, sharing a bath, a joint and almost certainly a bed with a very young-looking girl and later scoring with the attractive but frustrated middle-aged wife, played by Joan Hackett, of his shallow manager played by Rip Torn. Clearly Simon adheres to the "Good to be Woody"-school of movie screenplay writing.
The narrative, such as it is, entails Jonah having some minor musical differences with his band out on the road, being set up with Torn, who in turn introduces him to, of all people, a very uncomfortable-seeming Lou Reed as a hipster record producer who all but adds a disco beat to Jonah's latest otherwise earnest and low-key material to try to get him back on the charts even if it means dropping hia band from the recording session.
We also see him at a "Salute to the 60's" television special alongside Sam and Dave and the Lovin' Spoonful, both of whom it was nice to see, each singing one of their biggest hits.
Otherwise, bar a few ups and downs with Brown, some goofing around with his kid in Central Park and of course some live musical performances of a handful of the soundtrack songs, there's not what you'd really call a significant story-arc here. Simon's dialogue for himself and his characters rarely seems natural with its cleverness drawing attention to itself, while the interplay with his band-members and his new manager and producer is bogged down by clichés.
The music is nice, not exactly riveting, rather like the movie itself, although the songs are neatly worked into the action, all ten of them not including the 60's protest-song spoof and the guest-shots mentioned earlier. On that subject, it sure was strange to see Simon's band warming up for the B-52's of all people at the beginning.
Undoubtedly something of a vanity project for Simon whose acting is unsurprisingly somewhat self-conscious throughout, he lacks the skill or presence to carry off the lead role here. As a movie, it's a bit of a moribund viewing experience, enlivened, although I'm probably overstating it, by the soundtrack material.
Very definitely one for fans of Simon, although Brown, Torn and Hackett each do a professional job in support.
