Less than Zero (1987)
(In French, On Cable TV, May 2019) If you’re looking for a film that exemplifies some of the worst excesses of the 1980s, Less than Zero would be a good way to start. Taking place among the privileged but disaffected youth of the Los Angeles rich, it reduces young adulthood to a meaningless series of parties, hook-ups and endless lines of cocaine. The more cynical will point at the film’s pedigree, traced back to a semiautobiographical novel written by a young L.A. native, and wonder how much of the novel appealed to the Hollywood studio executive culture. No matter how it came to be, though, Less than Zero is not the most uplifting film out there. While it ultimately pays some sort of acknowledgement at drugs being bad (killing off a main character to make the point), it does take place in this dispiriting environment of meaningless hedonism and rampant abuse. Still, there are a few things worth noticing here and there: Jamie Gertz frequently looks amazing (A reminder: I came of age in the big-hair late 1980s), while Robert Downey Jr. has an ironic role as a drug-addled young man. James Spader also has an early role as the film’s remorseless antagonist drug dealer. The indignation of the film rings a bit false considering how thoroughly it wallows in filth, but that was Beverly Hills in the 1980s. It doesn’t help that the film doesn’t have much of a plot, seemingly content to repeat itself with different inflections. Less than Zero had, upon release, quite a reputation associated with it and the novel’s author, enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis—hype and fear that their transgressive fiction would prove the new mainstream. That has largely been forgotten over the decades, but I’m not sure that this absence of hype has been kind to Less Than Zero: Stripped of the importance placed on it, it frequently feels like a performative melodrama meant to shock but otherwise hollow.
