this week in film and television

SILENT FILMS / LIVE MUSIC

John Schaefer’s “Silent Films / Live Music” series returns to Brookfield Place this week

Brookfield Place
230 Vesey St.
January 30 – February 1, free, 7:30
www.artsbrookfield.com

In a 2011 twi-ny talk about his “Silent Films / Live Music” series at the World Financial Center Winter Garden, in which he selects silent movies to be accompanied by live scores, WNYC’s John Schaefer said, “The films seem less like period pieces themselves and more like a still-living art form.” After a hiatus, the program is back at Arts Brookfield, with Schaefer again running the show, reenergizing black-and-white silent cinema. On three successive nights, January 30 to February 1, Schaefer will present classic films with live accompaniment, beginning Wednesday with Marc Ribot performing to Charles Chaplin’s The Kid, followed Thursday by F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror with music by Irene and Linda Buckley, and concluding Friday with series favorite Alloy Orchestra playing to Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld. Each screening begins at 7:30; admission is free.

A Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) and an abandoned child (Jackie Coogan) form a family in The Kid

THE KID (Charles Chaplin, 1921)
Wednesday, January 30, free, 7:30
www.artsbrookfield.com

Charlie Chaplin’s first feature, The Kid, was a breakthrough for the British-born silent-film star, a touching and tender sixty-eight-minute triumph about a poor soul getting a second chance at life. When a baby arrives at his doorstep, a Tramp (Chaplin) first tries to ditch the boy, but he ends up taking him to his ramshackle apartment and raising him as if he were his own flesh and blood. Although he has so little, the Tramp makes sure the child, eventually played by Jackie Coogan, has food to eat, clothes to wear, and books to read. Meanwhile, the mother (Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s former lover), who has become a big star, regrets her earlier decision and wonders where her son is, setting up a heartbreaking finale. In addition to playing the starring role, Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film and composed the score for his company, First National, wonderfully blending slapstick comedy, including a hysterical street fight with an angry neighbor, with touching melodrama as he examines poverty in post-WWI America, especially as seen through the eyes of the orphan boy, played beautifully by Coogan, who went on to marry Betty Grable, among others, and star as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Chaplin’s innate ability to tell a moving story primarily through images reveals his understanding of cinema’s possibilities, and The Kid holds up as one of his finest, alongside such other silent classics as 1925’s The Gold Rush and 1931’s City Lights. At Brookfield Place, Ribot will perform his 2010 score, which was commissioned for the New York Guitar Festival.

F. W. Murnau’s 1922 version of Nosferatu is a German expressionist classic

NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR (NOSFERATU, EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS) (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
Thursday, January 31, free, 7:30
www.artsbrookfield.com

In F. W. Murnau’s classic horror film, Max Schreck stars as Count Orlok, a creepy, inhuman-looking Transylvanian who is meeting with real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) in order to buy a house in Germany. Hutter soon learns that the count has a taste for blood, as well as lust for his wife, Ellen (Greta Schröder), whom he has left behind in Germany. When Count Orlok, a bunch of rats, and a group of coffins filled with Transylvanian earth head out on a ship bound for Wisborg, the race is on to save Ellen, and Germany. Murnau’s Nosferatu is set in an expressionist world of liminal shadows and fear, as he and cinematographers Fritz Arno Wagner and Günther Krampf continually place the menacing Orlok in oddly shaped doorways that help exaggerate his long, spiny fingers and pointed nose and ears. Unable to acquire the rights from Bram Stoker’s estate to adapt the Gothic horror novel Dracula into a film, writer Henrik Galeen (The Golem, The Student of Prague) and director Murnau (Sunrise, The Last Laugh) instead made Nosferatu, paring down the Dracula legend, changing the names of the characters, and tweaking the story in various parts. Upon its 1922 release, they were sued anyway, and all prints were destroyed except for one, ensuring the survival of what became a defining genre standard-bearer. In 1979, German auteur Werner Herzog (Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo) paid tribute to the earlier film with Nosferatu the Vampyre, a near scene-by-scene homage to Murnau’s original but with Stoker’s character names restored, as the book was by then in the public domain. Hans Erdmann’s complete score no longer exists, so numerous musical compositions have accompanied screenings and DVD/VHS releases over the years; at Brookfield Place, Irene and Linda Buckley will present the US premiere of their score.

Bull Weed (George Bancroft) offers Rolls Royce (Clive Brook) a new life in Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld

UNDERWORLD (Josef von Sternberg, 1927)
Friday, February 1, free, 7:30
www.artsbrookfield.com

The 2019 edition of “Silent Films / Live Music” has a grand finale February 1 with Alloy Orchestra performing to Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 silent black-and-white Underworld, generally considered the first modern gangster picture and a major influence on such films as William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy and Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar. Sternberg’s fourth film, Underworld is set in “a great city in the dead of night . . . streets lonely, moon-flooded . . . buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age.” The opening shot is of a superimposed clock, emphasizing that it is two o’clock in the morning, a time when most are tucked safely in their bed at home. But not Bull Weed (George Bancroft), who has just pulled off a bank heist, only to be spotted by Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), a down-on-his-luck drunken bum. At Bull’s hangout, the Dreamland Café, his girl, Feathers (Evelyn Brent), enters, and a single strand from her extravagant getup floats down, the camera following it until it is grabbed by Rolls Royce, who is sweeping the floor. Bull’s main rival, Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), tries to get the attention of Feathers, upsetting his own moll, Meg (Helen Lynch). Walking out of the nightclub, Bull is greeted by an electronic billboard proclaiming, “The City Is Yours.” (Howard Hawks goes one better in his seminal 1932 film, Scarface, in which the title character, Antonio “Tony” Camonte, played by Paul Muni, is encouraged by an electronic sign that tells him, “The World Is Yours.”) Laughing, Bull playfully asks Feathers, “What’ll you have?” She scoffs at him, then Rolls Royce, a former lawyer, says, “Attila, the Hun, at the gates of Rome.” To which Bull replies, “Who’s Attila? The leader of some wop gang?” The stage has been set for the rest of the film, built around jealousy and envy as both Buck and Rolls Royce, who Bull decides to rehabilitate, fall hard for Feathers, but Bull is not about to just sit back and take it.

Bull Weed (George Bancroft) is protective of his moll, Feathers (Evelyn Brent), in classic gangster picture

Underworld is an expressionist noir melodrama that became the template for the gangster-film genre, launching many of the major tropes, from characterization to narrative development. It’s shot in shadowy glory by Bert Glennon (Lloyd’s of London, Rio Grande) from the dark streets to a glamorous annual armistice ball and a spectacular shootout finale. Journalist, novelist, and playwright Ben Hecht (Notorious, Wuthering Heights), who based Bull on real-life Chicago criminal “Terrible” Tommy O’Connor, won the Best Writing (Original Story) Academy Award at the first Oscars; Robert N. Lee wrote the screenplay, with the adaptation by Charles Furthmann and titles by George Marion Jr. Von Sternberg went on to make such classic sound films as The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, and The Scarlett Empress with Marlene Dietrich. He directed only one full picture by himself after 1941, the 1953 Japanese war drama Anatahan; he died in Hollywood in 1969 at the age of seventy-five.

KARYN KUSAMA: AEON FLUX

Charlize Theron stars as live-action version of animated superhero in Aeon Flux

AEON FLUX (Karyn Kusama, 2005)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Sunday, January 27, 10:45 am
Series runs January 24-27
718-384-3980
www.aeonflux.com
nitehawkcinema.com

We were big fans of Peter Chung’s animated Aeon Flux shorts, which aired on MTV’s Liquid Television, and Karyn Kusama didn’t let us down with this live-action version — pay no attention to the mostly terrible reviews it garnered. A black-haired Charlize Theron stars as the title character, a Monican secret agent who is assigned by the otherworldly Handler (an oddly cast Frances McDormand) to assassinate Trevor Goodchild (Martin Csokas, who looks more and more like Kevin Spacey as the film goes on), the leader of the walled city of Bregna, the last civilization on earth in the year 2411. But Aeon is not able to pull the trigger, as some faraway, faded memory keeps her from killing him, even following the government’s murder of her sister (Amelia Warner) — and she soon finds herself being hunted by her former partner, Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo), who has hands for feet, while Trevor’s brother (Jonny Lee Miller) has plans of his own. Aeon Flux is simply good sci-fi fun; there are no outrageous special effects, the plot is riddled with holes, and we’re still trying to figure out what it all means, but heck, we never understood what was going on in the cool animated series either. The film is screening January 27 at 10:45 am in the Nitehawk Cinema tribute to Kusama being held January 24-27 in conjunction with the release of her latest, Destroyer. The four-day retrospective also includes Jennifer’s Body, The Invitation, Destroyer, Girlfight, and XX, with Kusama in person at several shows.

LATE NITES AT METROGRAPH: NEWS FROM HOME

Chantal Akerman combines footage of 1970s New York with letters from her mother in News from Home

NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Akerman, 1977)
Metrograph
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
January 24-26, 11:00; January 29, 7:00 & 9:00
Series runs through March 2
718-636-4100
metrograph.com

In 1971, twenty-year-old Chantal Akerman moved to New York City from her native Belgium, determined to become a filmmaker. Teaming up with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, she made several experimental films, including Hotel Monterey and La Chambre, before moving back to Belgium in 1973. But in 1976 she returned to New York City to make News from Home, a mesmerizing work about family and dislocation, themes that would be prevalent throughout her career. The film consists of long, mostly static shots, using natural sound and light, depicting a gray, dismal New York City as cars move slowly down narrow, seemingly abandoned streets, people ride the graffiti-laden subway, workers and tourists pack Fifth Ave., and the Staten Island Ferry leaves Lower Manhattan. The only spoken words occur when Akerman, in voice-over, reads letters from her mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, sent during Chantal’s previous time in New York, concerned about her daughter’s welfare and safety. “I’m glad you don’t have that job anymore and that you’re liking New York,” Akerman reads in one letter. “People here are surprised. They say New York is terrible, inhuman. Perhaps they don’t really know it and are too quick to judge.” Her mother’s missives often chastise her for not writing back more often while also filling her in on the details of her family’s life, including her mother, father, and sister, Sylviane, as well as local gossip.

Although it was not meant to be a straightforward documentary, News from Home now stands as a mesmerizing time capsule of downtrodden 1970s New York, sometimes nearly unrecognizable when compared to the city of today. The film also casts another light on the relationship between mother and daughter, which was highlighted in Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, in which Chantal attempts to get her mother, a Holocaust survivor, to open up about her experiences in Auschwitz. Nelly died shortly after filming, and Akerman committed suicide the following year, only a few months after No Home Movie played at several film festivals (and was booed at Locarno). News from Home takes on new meaning in light of Akerman’s end, a unique love letter to city and family and to how we maintained connections in a pre-internet world. News from Home is screening January 24-29 as part of the “Late Nites at Metrograph” series, which continues through March 2 with such other films as Diao Yi’nan’s Black Coal Thin Ice, Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell.

LIVE SOUND CINEMA: DANGER: DIABOLIK (LIVE SCORE BY MORRICONE YOUTH)

John Philip Law plays a criminal mastermind in Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik

DANGER: DIABOLIK (Mario Bava, 1968)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Wednesday, January 23, 7:00
718-384-3980
nitehawkcinema.com

Nitehawk Cinema’s “Live Sound Cinema” series continues January 23 with an inspired selection: Morricone Youth performing a live re-score to Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. The 1968 film was the last to be spoofed on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1999 — the year Morricone Youth was formed — prior to its 2017 reboot on Netflix, but don’t let that fool you; it’s no mere dated piece of schlock. The longtime underground fave has been steadily increasing its cred over the last decade, and deservedly so. The psychedelic crime thriller stars John Phillip Law as Diabolik, a criminal mastermind who pulls off seemingly impossible thefts right under the noses of the Minister of the Interior (Terry-Thomas), the intrepid Inspector Ginko (Michel Piccoli), and the frustrated chief of police (Claudio Gora), who eventually turns to mob boss Valmont (Adolfo Celi) for help. Wearing a body-hugging wetsuit of a costume, Diabolik is assisted by the love of his life, the gorgeous blonde Eva Kant (Marisa Mell), plotting their derring-do in an expansive underground lair. Based on the Italian comic book series by Angela and Luciana Giussani, the story rarely makes much sense, but it’s a hoot to watch, a trippy mix of Batman, James Bond, Robin Hood, and Austin Powers.

danger diabolik 2

The film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, who fired the initial director and main cast, which included first George Raft and then Gilbert Roland as Diabolik’s archnemesis, and at one point considered Catherine Deneuve to play Eva, but ultimately giallo master Bava (Black Sunday, Planet of the Vampires) hired Mell. If some of the sets look familiar, it may be because De Laurentiis actually reused them, as well as actors, right after Diabolik finished shooting, going straight into production on another comic book movie, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella. Diabolik also features what very well might be Ennio Morricone’s grooviest soundtrack, which becomes a character unto itself; he might be most famous for composing the scores for myriad classic Westerns, but he also wrote music for Dario Argento, Elio Petri, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Nitehawk presentation is a great match of film and music; you can get a taste of what you’re in for here, when Morricone Youth performed to Danger: Diabolik at Nitehawk in 2013. And Beastie Boys fans should check out their 1998 video for “Body Movin’,” a campy tribute to the movie. “Live Sound Cinema” continues February 14 with Reel Orchestrette playing a live score to Buster Keaton’s 1925 classic, Seven Chances.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: A TRAMWAY IN JERUSALEM

Mathieu Amalric and his real-life son listen to a busker in Amos Gitai’s A Tramway in Jerusalem

A TRAMWAY IN JERUSALEM (Amos Gitai, 2018)
Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Saturday, January 12, 7:00, and Sunday, January 13, 3:45
Festival runs January 9-22
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

Israeli auteur Amos Gitai makes a subtle plea for peace and equality in A Tramway in Jerusalem, having its US premiere January 12-13 at the New York Jewish Film Festival. The ninety-four-minute movie consists of a series of scenes shot along Jerusalem’s Light Rail Red Line, a tram shuttling passengers between the northeast and the southwest, stopping in such locations as Beit Hanina, Shu’afat, Ammunition Hill, Damascus Gate, Jaffa, and the Central Bus Station. The tram is a place where men, women, and children of all religious denominations, races, genders, classes, and nationalities exist on the same level, paying the same fare, no one receiving priority treatment as the tram moves from Palestinian to Israeli neighborhoods, from day into night. In the scripted Israeli-French coproduction, Gitai and cowriter Marie-Jose Sanselme create humorous, poignant, and occasionally cringeworthy scenarios featuring approximately three dozen actors, many of whom have appeared in such previous Gitai works as Kadosh, Kippur, Free Zone, and Kedma. Each scene is shot continuously by cinematographer Eric Gautier, with no cuts, essentially making the viewer a passenger on the tram, watching the goings-on in real time.

Two friends bump into each other and share intimate details of their lives in A Tramway in Jerusalem

The film opens with Israeli vocalist Noa (Achinoam Nini) singing the Hebrew song “Etz Chayim” (“The Tree of Life”) in extreme closeup as she looks out the window of the tram, outlining Gitai’s purpose. “It is a tree of life for those who cling to it / and those who uphold it are happy / Its ways are pleasant / and all of its paths peaceful,” she sings in Hebrew. A group of Orthodox men enthusiastically chants prayer and song, declaring, “The world is a very narrow bridge / But what’s really important / is not to be afraid / not afraid at all.” The new coach of a youth soccer team can’t get a word in edgewise as the manager hogs the spotlight with a reporter. A Muslim man complains about the Oslo Accords. A woman speaks about very intimate personal matters with a friend. A priest (Italian actor and director Pippo Delbono) mumbles about love and freedom. A man (French star Mathieu Amalric) and his son (Pierre Amalric) watch a strumming musician; later, the man reads passages Gustave Flaubert wrote about his journey to Israel with Maxime Du Camp, such as the following: “Jerusalem feels like a fortified mass grave, where old religions are silently rotting.” A security guard wanders through the tram, a reminder of the nation’s ills and ever-present dangers, particularly on public transportation. An ugly scene between a husband and wife about an affair is one of several moments that feel too random and out of place. It is all brought together smoothly by editor Yuval Orr and an evocative score by Louis Sclavis and Alex Claude, with each section separated by a black screen imprinted with the time of day (but not chronological). To avoid getting too claustrophobic, Gitai occasionally films outside the train, but only on the platform.

Gitai made A Tramway in Jerusalem on board a regularly scheduled tram, taking up two cars with the rail’s permission, although he did not get official government consent, partially because he has been openly critical of the current administration and Minister of Culture Miri Regev, who Gitai believes is reducing Israeli cinema to a propaganda machine. Israel’s diversity is represented by a diverse cast, which also includes Hana Laszlo, Yaël Abecassis, Yuval Scharf, Karen Mor, Lamis Ammar, and Mustafa Masi, speaking Hebrew, English, French, German, or Arabic. Gitai (Rabin, the Last Day; West of the Jordan River) is very clear about what he hopes to accomplish with the film. “A Tramway in Jerusalem is an optimistic and ironic metaphor of the divided city of Jerusalem in which we, Israelis, Palestinians, and others, try to simulate how life can happen in this microcosm or ‘sardine can’ of a tramway, in the utopian days to come,” he explains in his director’s statement. “Beyond the current days of conflict and violence, how can people accept each other’s existence, their differences and disputes, with no killing. Is this tram the sign that a peaceful coexistence is possible?” A Tramway in Jerusalem is screening January 12 at 7:00 and January 13 at 3:45 at the Walter Reade Theater, with Gitai participating in Q&As after each show. A joint presentation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, the New York Jewish Film Festival runs January 9-22, with such other films as Eric Barbier’s opening night Promise at Dawn, Yehonatan Indursky’s centerpiece Autonomies, and Bille August’s closing night A Fortunate Man.

IRANIAN FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK: 3 FACES

Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi plays himself in gorgeously photographed and beautifully paced 3 Faces

3 FACES (SE ROKH) (Jafar Panahi, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Sunday, January 13, 7:15
Series runs January 10-15
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.irfilmfestny.com

One of the most brilliant and revered storytellers in the world, Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi proves his genius yet again with his latest cinematic masterpiece, the tenderhearted yet subtly fierce road movie 3 Faces. The film, which made its US premiere this past fall at the New York Film Festival and won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, is screening January 13 as part of IFC Center’s inaugural Iranian Film Festival New York. As with some of Panahi’s earlier works, 3 Faces walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction while defending the art of filmmaking. Popular Iranian movie and television star Behnaz Jafari, playing herself, has received a video in which a teenage girl named Marziyeh (Marziyeh Rezaei), frustrated that her family will not let her study acting at the conservatory where she’s been accepted, commits suicide onscreen, disappointed that her many texts and phone calls to her hero, Jafari, went unanswered. Deeply upset by the video — which was inspired by a real event — Jafari, who claims to have received no such messages, enlists her friend and colleague, writer-director Panahi, also playing himself, to head into the treacherous mountains to try to find out more about Marziyeh and her friend Maedeh (Maedeh Erteghaei). They learn the girls are from a small village in the Turkish-speaking Azeri region in northwest Iran, and as they make their way through narrow, dangerous mountain roads, they encounter tiny, close-knit communities that still embrace old traditions and rituals and are not exactly looking to help them find out the truth.

Iranian star Behnaz Jafari plays herself as she tries to solve a mystery in Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces

Panahi (Offside, The Circle) — who is banned from writing and directing films in his native Iran, is not allowed to give interviews, and cannot leave the country — spends much of the time in his car, which not only works as a plot device but also was considered necessary in order for him to hide from local authorities who might turn him in to the government. He and Jafari stop in three villages, the birthplaces of his mother, father, and grandparents, for further safety. The title refers to three generations of women in Iranian cinema: Marziyeh, the young, aspiring artist; Jafari, the current star (coincidentally, when she goes to a café, the men inside are watching an episode from her television series); and Shahrzad, aka Kobra Saeedi, a late 1960s, early 1970s film icon who has essentially vanished from public view following the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, banned from acting in Iran. (Although Shahrzad does not appear as herself in the film, she does read her poetry in voiceover.) 3 Faces is gorgeously photographed by Amin Jafari and beautifully edited by Mastaneh Mohajer, composed of many long takes with few cuts and little camera movement; early on there is a spectacular eleven-minute scene in which an emotionally tortured Behnaz Jafari listens to Panahi next to her on the phone, gets out of the car, and walks around it, the camera glued to her the whole time in a riveting tour-de-force performance.

Behnaz Jafari and Jafar Panahi encounter culture clashes and more in unique and unusual road movie

3 Faces is Panahi’s fourth film since he was arrested and convicted in 2010 for “colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic”; the other works are This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, and Taxi Tehran, all of which Panahi starred in and all of which take place primarily inside either a home or a vehicle. 3 Faces is the first one in which he spends at least some time outside, where it is more risky for him; in fact, whenever he leaves the car in 3 Faces, it is evident how tentative he is, especially when confronted by an angry man. The film also has a clear feminist bent, not only centering on the three generations of women, but also demonstrating the outdated notions of male dominance, as depicted by a stud bull with “golden balls” and one villager’s belief in the mystical power of circumcised foreskin and how he relates it to former macho star Behrouz Vossoughi, who appeared with Shahrzad in the 1973 film The Hateful Wolf and is still active today, living in California. Panahi, of course, will not be present at the IFC screening, as his road has been blocked, leaving him a perilous path that he must navigate with great care. However, Iranian writer, director, and producer Bahman Farmanara will be at the festival for Q&As following three of his films, opening night’s Tale of the Sea in addition to I Want to Dance and Tall Shadows of the Wind. Cofounded and coprogrammed by Godfrey Cheshire, the first Iranian Film Festival New York includes such other classic and cutting-edge films as Asghar Yousefinejad’s The Home, Abbas Amini’s Hendi & Hormoz, and Houman Seyedi’s closing night Sheeple, in addition to a tribute to Abbas Kiarostami, who passed away in 2016 at the age of seventy-six, pairing Seifollah Samadian’s 76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami with Kiarostami’s 2016 short Take Me Home.

THE SOPRANOS FILM FESTIVAL: NOT FADE AWAY

The British Invasion changes the life of a suburban New Jersey high school kid in David Chase’s Not Fade Away

NOT FADE AWAY (David Chase, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Thursday, January 10, 7:15
Series runs January 9-14
212-924-7771
www.notfadeawaymovie.com
www.ifccenter.com

Inspired by his brief stint as a suburban New Jersey garage-band drummer with rock-and-roll dreams, Sopranos creator David Chase made his feature-film debt with the 2012 musical coming-of-age drama Not Fade Away. Written and directed by Chase, the film focuses on Douglas (John Magaro), a suburban New Jersey high school kid obsessed with music and The Twilight Zone. It’s the early 1960s, and Douglas soon becomes transformed when he first hears the Beatles and the Stones — while also noticing how girls go for musicians, particularly Grace (Bella Heathcote), whom he has an intense crush on but who only seems to date guys in bands. When his friends Eugene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) ask him to join their group, Douglas jumps at the chance, but it’s not until he gets the opportunity to sing lead one night that he really begins to think that music — and Grace — could be his life. Not Fade Away has all the trappings of being just another clichéd sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll movie, but Chase and musical supervisor (and executive producer) Steven “Silvio” Van Zandt circumvent genre expectations and limitations by, first and foremost, nailing the music. Van Zandt spent three months teaching the main actors how to sing, play their instruments, and, essentially, be a band, making the film feel real as the unnamed group goes from British Invasion covers to writing their own song. Even Douglas’s fights with his conservative middle-class father (James Gandolfini) and his battle with Eugene over the direction of the band are handled with an intelligence and sensitivity not usually seen in these kinds of films. Not Fade Away does make a few wrong turns along the way, but it always gets right back on track, leading to an open-ended conclusion that celebrates the power, the glory, and, ultimately, the mystery of rock and roll.

The film is being shown at IFC Center on January 10, with Chase, Magaro, and Van Zandt in attendance, as part of the Sopranos Film Festival, six days of screenings, related works, and discussions in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the HBO series, which debuted on January 10, 1999, to instant acclaim. The festival, programmed by Matt Zoller Seitz, coauthor with Alan Sepinwall of The Sopranos Sessions, kicks off January 9 at the SVA Theatre with “Woke Up This Morning: The Sopranos 20th Anniversary Celebration,” featuring clips and conversation with Chase, executive producers/writers Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner, executive producer Ilene S. Landress, and cast members Edie Falco, Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperioli, Dominic Chianese, Van Zandt, Tony Sirico, Vincent Pastore, Robert Iler, and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, moderated by Zoller Seitz. Also on the schedule are Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance, Kristian Fraga’s My Dinner with Alan, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy, and such key Sopranos episodes as “The Knight in White Satin Armor,” “Proshai, Livushka,” “Pine Barrens,” and “The Test Dream,” paired with Bugs Bunny and Three Stooges shorts as well as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, placing the series, which garnered 111 Emmy nominations and 21 wins during its six seasons, in rather wide-ranging context.