Part of the reason that celebrities occupy a monarchical stratosphere, particularly in the United States, is that we seem, as a society, addicted not only to the traditional narrative cycles of debutante presentation, evolution, destruction and reinvention, but also the polarities that the rich and famous live out — lifestyles of wild excess which, by definition, cannot be sustained. Rock ‘n’ rollers probably most embody this behavior. But one of the few modern traditional artists who seemed, on an almost instinctive level, to grasp the peculiarities of this public appetite was Jean-Michael Basquiat, a painter who rocketed from graffiti-tagging anonymity and bohemian near-homelessness to avant-garde superstar status, and the subject of an absorbing but fawning new documentary, Jean-Michel
Basquiat: The Radiant Child, opening this week at the
Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles.

Directed by Tamra Davis, who developed a close friendship with the late artist, the film is centered around on a rare and heretofore unshared interview that she and another friend conducted with Basquiat over 20 years ago. Still, it’s not merely a postcard from the grave. While her chat with Basquiat is obviously the film’s centerpiece attraction, Davis also tracks down a dazzling array of old collaborators, friends, professional peers and the like for interviews, including Glenn O’Brien, Larry Gagosian, Fab 5 Freddy, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Jeffrey Deitch, Julian Schnabel, Annina Nosei, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Kenny Scharf and ex-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, among many others.

The result achieves impressionistic definition if not complete chronological clarity, chronicling the meteoric rise and fall of an extremely young and in many ways unlikely artist. In the crime-ridden New York City of the late 1970s, Basquiat, along with friend Al Diaz, started covering the city
with abstract poetic graffiti verses, tagged with SAMO, a quasi-acronym standing for “Same Old Shit.” A buzz built, and in 1981 he put paint to canvas for the
first time, forming the “Downtown ’81” collective with some friends. In under a year he had his first formal show, for which he took home over $200,000 in a single night. Friendship and collaboration with Andy Warhol ensued, along with an array of other shows, but in 1988 Basquiat’s heroin addiction worsened, and he died
of an overdose at the age of 27.

However close Davis was to her subject — and portions of the film trade rather wanly on his undeniable charisma, as he’s a warm and inviting if still enigmatic subject who never truly lets down his guard — The Radiant Child makes a convincing case that Basquiat had, at the very least, a unique amalgam gift for translating the loose, jangly energy of the bohemian street into high art. Some of the details are arresting (Basquiat frequently painted to Ravell’s “Bolero,” which certainly seems to inform the energy of his lines and color choices), and certainly the biographical details about his mother’s bouts of mental instability and accountant father’s emotional distance color an understanding of the man behind the art.

Still, there are some interesting and provocative ideas that Davis never fully explores, as when ArtForum‘s Rene Ricard, whose laudatory profile piece from early in the artist’s career gives the film its title, talks about explicitly wanting to hitch his own wagon to an ascendant star in the art world. Putting this together with Basquiat’s well known and pronounced ambition, and penchant for knowing presentation of self, it’s not hard to see another side of the artist, irrespective of his talent, that The Radiant Child never tries to really shine a light on — that of a confused and overwhelmed but shrewdly calculating kid who had a huge investment in the material benefits of personal mythology.

In its very real intimacy, The Radiant Child achieves warmth, but Davis is not interested in paying the price of a deeper truth, in trying to peg the specifics of Basquiat’s descent into drug use, and those who might have enabled him. Such is the rub for documentaries that come from so close within an artist’s orbit. For more information, click here. (Arthouse Films/Curiously Bright Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)

The conundrum facing many independent-minded would-be filmmakers is how much, if any, attention to pay to the marketplace. Ignorance to the commercial realities of eventual distribution (in whatever form) is dangerous, and yet pandering to patty-cake notions of superior “character-rooted narrative” has resulted in its own set of collective sins, I’d argue — a robust slate of risible low-fi product in which ethnically diverse families come of age in America, small town soldiers return home from Iraq, or various combinations of philandering hipsters grapple with heroin, dyslexia and coming out of the closet. Multi-hyphenate Todd Berger’s The Scenesters intuitively understands this — what makes voracious but mainstream-leaning film audiences queasy or skeptical about “indie” film as a more broadly categorized movement — and has loads of fun twisting it in all sorts of pretzel shapes in service of a rangy, noir-tinged murder comedy.

A quirky and engaging film that honors many of the conventions of classic whodunit? cinema while also giving them both a modern spin and a deconstructive nudge to the ribs, The Scenesters centers on a smarmy, out-of-work film director named Wallace Cotton (Berger, above
center) and his equally self-centered producer, Roger Graham (Jeff Grace), who land work as crime scene videographers, and set out to make some great art. They quickly stumble across crime scene cleaner Charlie Newton (Blaise Miller, resembling a cross between Casey Affleck and Dwight Yoakam), a schlubby, down-on-his-luck guy who’s quietly honed a superb sense of deduction through his work.

As a couple of apathetic detectives (Kevin Brennan and Monika Jolly) investigate a series of killings in ultra-hip East Los Angeles, Charlie discovers clues that link together the killings, which convinces Wallace and Roger that Charlie is himself the perfect subject around which to center an investigative movie. As the body count mounts — and Charlie is encouraged to romantically reconnect with a beautiful reporter, Jewell Wright (Suzanne May), at the center of the story — Wallace and Roger angle to stay ahead of the killer, and craft a winning documentary, no matter the outside corporeal toll.

Reminiscent in some slight ways of Russell Brown’s The Blue Tooth Virgin, another inside-Hollywood tale that wasn’t afraid to showcase under-the-radar ambition in ways that didn’t always flatter its characters, The Scenesters unfolds against the backdrop of a (n appropriate) hipster soundtrack that includes the Airborne Toxic Event, the Cribs, Wallpaper, Le Switch and more. Scream is obviously something of a touchstone inspiration here (and Chinatown, too, for the film within the film), but the shoegazing, mumblecore cinema of the Duplass brothers also rates mentioning, both because of this movie’s DIY ethos and the fact that it’s simultaneously self-aware about the dangers of arthouse pretension. Berger’s film spins off all sorts of jokey asides (Charlie’s crime scene training video, a music video from a side project rock band one of the cops fronts), as well as a trial session framing device that features Sherilyn Fenn as a prosecutor and John Landis as the judge, and sometimes these bits don’t connect. Or, rather, they play OK as scenes, but muddy the editorial collection as a whole — a sense of how much what an audience is watching is formed after the fact, and by whom, after the conclusion of the murder spree mystery at its core.

Smartly, though, Berger seeds his film with all sorts of mini-conflicts and personality clashes, which makes for much fun and amusement. His dialogue has some salty bite (“Would it kill people to find bodies during magic hour — I feel like I’m on the face of the sun” Wallace bitches at one crime scene), and doesn’t always dwell on its punchlines, in a hamfisted effort to drill them home, and let you know how “smart” it is. A few of the performances aren’t quite up to the par with the material, and the movie could have benefited from a bit more rakish snap to its telling, particularly in the finale. But The Scenesters has in abundance what every independent film yearns for — intrigue and a cocksure rhythm that doesn’t ever feel false. If its plotting doesn’t in the end leave much room for a big surprise, that’s no reason not to surrender to the pleasures it provides along the way. Sometimes a nice slice of archness can be a good thing. For a trailer and more information, click here. (Vactioneer/Midwinter Studios, unrated, 101 minutes)

Hollywood comedies, more often than not, go big in terms of everything — concepts, emotion, stakes and action — because there’s always the fear that if the laughs aren’t coming at a certain clip, and always out loud, then they’re not really there. Comedies with more modest, recognizably human stakes — that aim for smiles or silent, inwardly reflected laughter — are a rare breed, and often end up shuttled off straight to video, or released in top-market, platform fashion by independent distributors.

All of which brings us to The Switch, toplined by two stars, released by a major studio, and featuring an outrageous concept (unwitting sperm swap!) that would seem to augur much more slapstick demonstrativeness than is present. Starring Jason Bateman and Jennifer
Aniston, and adapted by Alan Loeb from a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides), co-directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck’s movie is a curious but not unpleasant thing, not the least of which is because of the wide gulf between its concept and how it’s being marketed and the more melancholic reality of what it is.

Bateman stars as Wally Mars, an uptight white collar New York City investment guru whose best friend is Kassie Larson (Aniston). When Kassie deems the ticking of her biological clock too loud to wait around any further for a guy, she decides to pursue artificial insemination. Wally has carried a torch for Kassie forever (they dated briefly, we’re told), but, unable to hoist the bat off his shoulder and take a real swing at things, he glumly agrees to attend her impregnation party, where he meets her sperm donor, Roland (Patrick Wilson), before consoling himself by getting wasted.

Kassie further breaks Wally’s heart by leaving New York, wanting to raise her child back in Minnesota, where she’s from. Years later, however, she returns, with her six-year-old son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) in tow. Wally is initially less interested in getting to know the kid than in simply reconnecting with Kassie, but soon starts to notice similarities between himself and this little smart, sensitive hypochondriac. Could he have really switched sperm samples the night of Kassie’s party? And how should he break this news to her? Things are additionally complicated by the fact that Roland, fresh off a divorce, is now in play romantically for a possibly interested Kassie.

So hijinks ensue, right? No, not really. More like low-fidelity fumbling and uncertainty, all slipped under some downbeat narration from Bateman. A mid-tempo work that’s not wildly dissimilar from Steve Conrad’s The Promotion and Stephen Belber’s Management (another film in which Aniston appeared, opposite Steve Zahn), The Switch takes a narrative conceit seemingly built for zany flight and tries to find the grounded human angles, which is sometimes tough. If the sense of scene-to-scene attachment and investment at times feels a bit sluggish or lacking (particularly early on), it’s because, as with many books but far fewer films, The Switch invests heartily in scenes with Wally figuring out what the audience already knows (e.g., a long talk with a pal, played by Jeff Goldblum, in which he eventually reconnects the dots of the drunken evening in question).

This isn’t a disqualifying problem so much as an observation. Owing largely to its source roots but also marked by choices in its cinematic adaptation, The Switch is deeply concerned with character and interior feeling (Wally’s ambivalence regarding possible fatherhood, and whether he can accept it either with or without romantic strings attached) and so it takes its time in meting out conflict; its unfussy slipstream rhythms are the exact opposite of the look-at-me gyrations and gesticulations that comprise so much of modern big screen comedy. If one counts their enjoyment of a film of this ilk solely based on laughing out loud, then The Switch is most assuredly not for them. If, however, they enjoy laughing silently to oneself, and then thinking a bit about where that laughter comes from, The Switch has some enjoyable moments to offer.

Kassie, thankfully, isn’t completely oblivious to the notion of Wally’s attraction to her, but the film is least persuasive in sketching out the deep-set particulars of their relationship, which seems to exist in an entirely desexualized state — somewhat ironic, given the nature of the movie’s conceit. Where The Switch is also very much in lockstep with its romantic comedy colleagues is in its flubbing of the penultimate moment of conflict, wherein Wally has to decide how to come clean to Kassie about what he’s done. Kassie reacts angrily, not because of anything rooted in logic, but seemingly only because the story then requires a stormy moment.

Still, Bateman is the exact right anchor for this sort of material, able to convey a quiet inner desperation while also still ringing up laughs and smiles purely off of line readings, based on his impeccable sense of timing. (Aniston, while still radiant, is a bit less successful, if only because Kassie seems underwritten, prone to flighty rationalizations.) While it’s being sold as another comedy of anarchic male ribaldry, the title of The Switch actually plays two ways since its atypicality is its biggest blessing. (Disney, PG-13, 101 minutes)

Samuel Maoz’s claustrophobic war drama, which picked up the Golden Lion prize at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, is decidedly a case of the emperor’s new clothes — a forcedly subjective movie that takes the complexities and moral grayness of war and reduces it to empty melodrama cloaked in air-quote artfulness.

Based on Maoz’s personal experience serving in the Israeli army during the 1982 war of the same name, Lebanon takes place inside a tank during the first 24 hours of the invasion, as an inexperienced crew pushes nervously into a fire zone. There’s some initial imaginativeness to the film’s cinematography — unfolding through the tank’s crosshairs, with all its jerkiness and zooms — but this tack rather quickly becomes grating, and overall seems like a gambit to avoid taking responsibility for choices of framing.

A big part of the problem is that Maoz’s film is populated with characters so ineffectual as to undermine any cultivated sense of bother for or investment in their predicament. More problematically, Lebanon is riddled with falsely struck notes regardless of the subjects’ character and mettle. It’s wildly inconceivable, for instance, that once a Syrian who has fired a RPG at the group is captured and placed in the tank for transport, no one within has a problem with him, or indeed even seems concerned with interacting with him, one way or another. In introducing the potential for tension, only to fumble it away in ways equally unrealistic and infuriating, Lebanon proves itself resolutely incapable of adding anything new to the old adage, “War is hell.” (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 92 minutes)

Human history is littered with all manner of mass killing — from serial murders and genocides to crusades and wars of territorial incursion — and yet such evil is consistently rendered as beyond the pale in public accountings, as somehow aberrant and not a default state of the human condition that we are almost all possibly capable of if pushed to the limit, and faced with some of the same sorts of terrible circumstances.

Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath’s stirring, stomach-churning new documentary, Enemies of the People, reveals just how banal evil really is. The winner of a dozen top documentary festival awards, including the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Festival, the film provides a from-the-bottom-up look at the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, and concludes, chillingly, that amorality can indeed not only exist but also apparently thrive in a vacuum.

Journalist Sambath, whose family was wiped out in the Killing Fields, serves as the movie’s anchor and guide, his friendly smile masking a world of swallowed pain. The end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War set the stage for lingering unrest in neighboring Cambodia, where they remained distrustful of Vietnamese influence, to boil over, with terrible consequences. Sambath’s father became one of the nearly two million people murdered by the Khmer Rouge when he refused to give them his buffalo and other personal property. Sambath’s mother was then forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman, and subsequently died in childbirth in 1976; his eldest brother disappeared in 1977. Sambath himself escaped Cambodia at age 10, when the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979.

Fast forward to 1998, when Sambath, now a newspaperman in Phom Penh, got to know the children of some senior Khmer Rouge officials, and gradually earn their trust. For almost a decade he toiled on this passion project, leaving his own family and spending weekends on the road, working to gain the confidence of various
lower-level Khmer Rouge soldiers, now ordinary fathers and grandfathers, as well as the regime’s most senior surviving leader, Nuon Chea, the ranking number two officer under Pol Pot. Piecing together these interviews with narrated bits recounting some of his own familial history, Sambath and co-director Lemkin show how readily in the din and chaos of war — or, indeed, even just the presence of an emotionally charged us-versus-them scenario — ordinary people will do terrible things to their fellow countrymen.

This subject matter and the wrenching firsthand details that Sambath collects — ex-Khmer Rouge foot soldiers demonstrate in matter-of-fact fashion how they slit people’s throats, but one confesses that sometimes he had to alternate his grip and go for a straight stab of the neck because his arm became too tired from the repetitive motion — make for an engrossing if at times sickening experience. It’s a bit frustrating, then, that Sambath’s skill set as a filmmaker (and by extension Lemkin’s, since while he doesn’t appear on screen he shares in every other significant credit) doesn’t quite match his abundant reservoir of personal tolerance, and don’t extend to include a slightly more pointed and assertive investigatory style. Sambath’s hesitance to share his personal history with his most senior subject is understandable (and repeatedly explained within the film), but when video footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution by hanging surfaces and is shown to Nuon Chea, he has a curious reaction (“In spite of his arrest, [Saddam] showed he was a winner, and not a loser”) that, disappointingly, the filmmakers never follow up on.

It’s these sorts of small omissions in pressing that, far more important than just letting Nuon Chea off the hook, fail to fully illuminate the mindset that, in his words, would have stood by while governmental orders for the arrest and execution of specifically targeted political opponents were somehow translated into a systematic campaign of minority elimination in the eastern portion of the country. Enemies of the People toes the truth of human unpleasantness, getting closer to it than is comfortable for many general audiences (a Khmer Rouge boss, decades on, continues to refer to the ethnic cleansing as a “problem”) but doesn’t fully hold a mirror up to its most repugnant subject. Still, it’s a powerful and important work. For more information, click here. (International Film Circuit, R, 94 minutes)