IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Seeing the Michael J. Fox biopic "Still" on Apple TV+ last month stuck with me, so I skipped the latest "Transformers" film to raid Fox's catalog for a couple of his lesser-loved films to see how they hold up in retrospect.

Writer-director Paul Schrader's "Light of Day" cast Fox alongside rock 'n' roll musician Joan Jett in 1987, while Jay McInerney wrote the screenplay for the 1988 movie adaptation of his own novel, "Bright Lights, Big City," which starred Fox in 1988.

Both films were released in theaters during the gap between 1985's "Back to the Future" and 1989's "Back to the Future Part II," before NBC's "Family Ties" also ended in 1989. At the time, I remember thinking that Fox's performances in both films had received undue degrees of criticism, simply because even ostensibly objective reviewers couldn't see past the shadows of Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton.

To start with, both films are armed with insanely overqualified casts, but back then, I suspect the Michael J. Fox brand helped recruit a number of distinguished actors who might otherwise have passed on either of these projects.

Years ago, the deliciously vicious movie critic Joe Queenan pegged the central irony of "Light of Day" as being that its co-leads were an actor (Fox) and a rock musician (Jett) who were each respectably successful in their own fields, but both clearly kind of wanted to try their hands at what the other was doing (Fox as a musician, Jett as an actress), with decidedly mixed results.

It didn't help that the trailers for "Light of Day" depicted it as a fist-pumping fable of aspiring rockers staying true to their dreams while persevering through personal struggles, when it was instead a working-class family drama with a few brief small-stage concert interludes on the side.

Schrader, who wrote Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" in 1976 and directed Richard Gere in "American Gigolo" in 1980, delivers a surprisingly subdued portrait of a troubled and negligent single mom (an emotionally authentic Jett), her own ailing mother (a haunting Gena Rowlands) and her increasingly impatient brother (Fox), who's too hot-headed to hold their family together.

At one point, when Jett's band is on the road, Fox's character is left to care for his young nephew, and when the little boy mistakenly refers to him as his "dad" rather than his "uncle," Fox does a deft job of conveying how much his character is not OK with becoming the de facto surrogate father to his sister's kid.

"Light of Day" benefits from the absence of an obligatory romantic subplot or an inspirational through-line to its narrative.

It also boasts understated but well-executed supporting performances by the musically skilled Michael McKean, of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries, and the quietly powerful Jason Miller, of "The Exorcist," who effortlessly elicits our sympathies through his character's stoic suffering, as he loses his wife, in slow motion, to mental decline and cancer.

Amusingly, among the credited musical performers who constituted the film's fake bands, future Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor's name appears dead last.

"Bright Lights, Big City" possesses a personal resonance for me, because I met Jay McInerney through my creative writing courses at Syracuse University, less than a decade after this film's release. I was not surprised to find him a puckishly mercurial figure.

What McInerney's writing and Fox's acting capture so perfectly is the dark side of all those good-boy junior achievers whom Fox played in the family-friendly fare of

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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