Star 80 (1983)

Directed by Bob Fosse. Starring Eric Roberts, Mariel Hemingway, Cliff Robertson, Roger Rees, Carroll Baker, David Clennon, Josh Mostel, Lisa Gordon, Tina Willson, Keith Hefner, Stuart Damon. [R]

An unsettling but transfixing dramatization of the lives of two doomed individuals, insecure in wildly different ways—the sleazy and creepy hustler Paul Snider (Roberts) and the pretty but naïve and browbeaten model/actress Dorothy Stratten (Hemingway). She was seduced by flattery, he was quick to jealousy and anger, and even if the story wasn’t based in sordid truth (or if the movie didn’t use brief flash-forwards to signal a despairing, bloody conclusion), their ugly ruin can be seen only as an inevitability. Director Fosse doesn’t stylize the material through self-indulgent excess like he did with his prior picture (All That Jazz), but instead takes a matter-of-fact, almost voyeuristic approach, refusing to editorialize the events or psychoanalyze the subjects. It’s potent, to be sure; the sort of sickness that can get under the skin in a hurry. But as the sort of movie that eschews a comforting moral lesson or emotional catharsis to bluntly show how lives can be destroyed by internal demons and an exploitative industry, it’s disquietingly effective. Hemingway is better than one would expect as the shy, vulnerable starlet, and Roberts is as magnetic as he is repulsive—imagine keeping him at arm’s length with a disgusted cringe while grabbing his collar to make sure you don’t miss a moment. The story was previously told in a 1981 TV-movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Stratton (Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story). Rees’ filmmaker character, Aram, is a stand-in for Peter Bogdanovich, who wanted nothing to do with the movie. Fosse’s final film, and also his best.

79/100