Beyond the Multiplex

"Delirious": A raging speck of dust in the universe clamors for attention -- and then there's Tom DiCillo's new movie!
Almost everybody in the film world likes writer-director Tom DiCillo, and that's for good reasons and maybe for bad ones too. DiCillo's films at their best have an acerbic, slightly dark, fairy-tale intensity, and even at their worst they're reliably charming. As DiCillo himself seems aware, he'd be an easier target if he were a bigger one; that is, if he'd ever graduated to the level of fame and success his early career seemed to promise.

DiCillo was the cinematographer for Jim Jarmusch's breakthrough film, "Stranger Than Paradise," in 1984, and seven years later he made a dynamic impression with his own directing debut, "Johnny Suede." That movie starred a handsome young fellow named Brad Pitt, and that little-known actor's subsequent trajectory is, unfairly but inevitably, always going to be compared to DiCillo's. The director denies that the part of Chad Palomino, the vain and self-absorbed movie star played by James LeGros in DiCillo's 1995 Indiewood satire "Living in Oblivion," was based on Pitt, so we'll leave that question alone and move on.

When I met DiCillo last week for coffee at a midtown Manhattan hotel, he told a funny story about the aftermath of "Johnny Suede" that epitomizes his perennially marginal status. That film won the best-picture award at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland -- the first place it was publicly screened -- and DiCillo was promptly written up in the trade magazines as a hot young talent. "When I came home, there were three phone messages," he says. "One from Spielberg's company, one from Scorsese's company, and one from somebody else, I can't remember who. They were all saying, 'Please call us right away.' I called every one of them, and -- I'm not kidding -- no one had any memory of making the phone call in the first place. I swear to God!"

What we can say for sure is that DiCillo's films have tremendous integrity and sincerity, but they've never done much business or radiated tremendous hipness. (The sincerity, and maybe the integrity too, could be implicated.) He's made only four features since "Living in Oblivion," and one of those (the 2001 cop drama "Double Whammy") was never theatrically released in the U.S. despite premiering at Sundance. Recently, he's been directing episodes of "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" and "Monk," both to keep working and to pay the bills.

I'm delighted to report that his new movie, "Delirious," is among DiCillo's best, and returns to the central theme of his career: the elusive and destructive nature of fame. Steve Buscemi provides a brilliant performance as Les Galantine, a low-end celebrity photographer who scrapes out a living from his incredibly dingy New York apartment, brooding over every perceived slight from his parents, his co-workers and the P.R. apparatchiks who control his career. Apparently, and for the most part actually, a leech-like parasite on the celebrity organism, Les gradually becomes a halfway sympathetic figure with his own kind of gutter nobility.

"Les is like a raging speck of dust in the universe who is screaming for some sort of attention," says DiCillo. "Consider his name, Les Galantine. There is a certain gallantry to him. He struggles, he fights. There's something strangely compelling about him. He just can't stand it when people don't give him validation, and that's the source, I believe, of an awful lot of human behavior. Do I see some of myself in that character? Absolutely."

When Les meets Toby (Michael Pitt), a homeless, angel-faced street kid who yearns to become an actor, he has finally found someone whom he can instruct in the ways of the world (and to whom he can feel superior). Toby crashes in Les' closet and becomes his unpaid assistant, helping Les get a tabloid-ready snap of an action star named Chuck Sirloin as he emerges from a clinic after penile surgery.

These two guys build a relationship of genuine affection, but "Delirious" turns around the fact that each is ready to betray the other in search of their respective grails. (There's more than a little of "All About Eve" in this movie, albeit translated into guy-scumbag idiom.) Fate puts Toby in the path of K'harma (Alison Lohman), a Britney-esque pop singer going through a life crisis, but Les is still there, hanging over Toby's shoulder like an embarrassing older brother, eager to remind this former innocent of the debt he still owes. (K'harma's music video, for her hit "Take This Love and Shove It," is worth the price of admission all by itself.)

"I want to make sure that we don't say the film is a satire about the business of fame, because it really isn't," says DiCillo. "It's a film about two guys who accidentally meet and form a bond, and then something happens to wrench them apart." Beyond that, he adds, it's an allegory or a myth. "It's the same myth that keeps us fascinated about the movie business," he says. "We always go with the hope of seeing something genuine, even though we know that most of the entertainment shit we see is fake and stupid. We think we might see something, that someone might surprise us with that moment of total purity where we see into their soul. Toby is this lost innocent, wandering through the forest of New York. Les is the troll that he meets underneath the bridge, and Toby has to make a deal with him to get across that bridge. K'harma is the princess who's lost her soul, that Toby has to save."

If Toby's innocent quest leads only to the land of disposable, 15-second fame, while Les' apparent life of sleaze and corruption has a kind of twisted honor, well, that might be DiCillo's worldview in a nutshell. But if DiCillo is far from a big-money celebrity filmmaker, he's not quite Les Galantine either. As he notes, he's seen the fame game from both sides. "My fascination with fame and celebrity isn't just, 'Oh wow, how crazy!' or 'How funny!' or 'How stupid!' It's because there's so much at stake and how destructive it can be. The process that Toby gets swept up in, the current that pulls him along -- many sacrifices have to be made along the way.

"On a personal level, I've had people furious at me because I won't cast them in a movie. On every single one of my movies, I try to work with my friends, people I know. But I still have people who won't talk to me -- old friends of mine -- who won't talk to me because they feel I've betrayed them. I try to tell them, 'Guys, do you have any concept what I'm doing here? The movie has to work! If the movie doesn't work, I may never make another one.' But here's this guy who's struggling, who could really benefit from a part in my movie. It's a horrific dilemma to be in.

"On the other hand, I know people who just cut and run and go 'Fuck you, man!' They never look back. I've had that happen to me. I've put people in my movies who were nobodies, and then I never see them again." I will reiterate here that DiCillo insists he is not talking about the star of "Johnny Suede."

DiCillo has two more movies in development -- the one with Buscemi and Willem Dafoe as inept white supremacists sounds especially promising -- but he's well aware that at age 53, with only six films on his résumé, his filmmaking future hangs in the balance. "God damn it, I'm terrified," he says. "I feel great about the movie, but how are people going to respond? Critical response is going to be so important. If the critics pan it, that's basically it. So I'm busting my ass trying to give it a chance. I've seen it with audiences and I've seen how they are affected by it. Not on some stupid, superficial level. They go, 'Wow! That touches something in me.' I need to believe, as a filmmaker, that that response enables me to make another movie."

"Delirious" is now playing at the Angelika Film Center and the Clearview 62nd Street in New York. It opens Aug. 17 in Los Angeles, Aug. 31 in Boston and Chicago, Sept. 14 in San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., Sept. 21 in Atlanta and Portland, Ore., Oct. 5 in Seattle and Oct. 12 in St. Louis, with other cities to follow.

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