Youthful promise, early success, sudden fame and career flameouts are the subjects of two films opening today. And although one is a disposable, largely forgettable star vehicle and the other a nonfiction true-crime story, they share more than just thematic elements. On slightly deeper levels, they're about American audiences' love for bad boys, those audiences' fascination with those who scorn and snarl at them in return, and, finally, the inevitable turning of the karmic tables, when all the bad behavior, trash talk and infantile terror is met with retribution. As regular viewers of E!, A&E and VH1 will tell you, just deserts are always best served cold -- preferably with popcorn and a remote control.
As a matter of fact, "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star" is structured along the lines of an "E! True Hollywood Story," featuring comedian David Spade as a washed-up sitcom actor who gained fame 20 years ago. Now in his mid-thirties, Dickie parks cars at the tony Los Angeles restaurant Morton's, compulsively wears leather gloves to avoid touching people and schemes about getting his moribund acting career back on track. When Dickie snags an audition with Rob Reiner for an upcoming film, the director suggests that he never had a proper childhood and thus can't access the emotions and sense memories with which an actor prepares. Dickie then advertises for a foster family, with whom he will live for a month as a regular child, hack the appropriate psychic material into his hard drive, re-audition for Reiner, win the part and become famous again.
Mary McCormack, like the rest of the cast of "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star," labors to push the David Spade vehicle forward.
(Sam Emerson -- AP)
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On this rickety scaffolding of a premise does "Dickie Roberts" wobble, never gracefully but not entirely disastrously either. Part nasty inside-showbiz comedy on a par with "Death to Smoochy" and part allegory à la "The Cat in the Hat," the movie has been made with consummate carelessness but with occasional moments of knowing humor. The filmmakers have populated the supporting cast with former child stars -- Emmanuel Lewis, Maureen McCormick, Danny Bonaduce, Dustin Diamond, Leif Garrett and Corey Feldman all have cameos as themselves -- and they stage a mildly funny scene wherein Dickie and some of those actors play poker and bemoan the current state of Hollywood casting ("George Clooney? Like, what's that about?").
Once Dickie becomes ensconced in his new household, he becomes the archetypal trickster, wreaking havoc on domestic order, subverting parental authority and, at the end of the day, bringing healing love to all with whom he comes into contact. "Dickie Roberts" is leavened considerably in these sequences by the actors who play Dickie's pseudo-siblings, especially Jenna Boyd, who delivers a scene-stealing rap routine.
Its all-too-modest charms notwithstanding, "Dickie Roberts" still presents viewers with the conundrum of Spade himself. Like the film's co-executive producer, Adam Sandler, and Jon Lovitz, who plays Dickie's hapless agent, Spade has made a career of cultivating a snarky, sarcastic, mildly abusive and, in his case, blandly sneering persona that clearly has traction with a critical -- or, perhaps more accurately, uncritical -- mass of TV watchers and filmgoers. (The continually vexing problem of Rob Schneider will be a philosophical quandary for the ages.) What's their appeal, other than as writ-large versions -- with better joke-writers -- of the worst in their own fans? "Dickie Roberts" is admittedly warmer and better-mannered than most of Sandler's lunkheaded screeds -- in other words, it's harmless -- but it's never entirely likable.
Dickie Roberts is never as dislikable, though, as the subject of "Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator," Helen Stickler's nonfiction account of Mark "Gator" Rogowski, who shot to fame in the 1980s as a skateboard star. He was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and hanging with movie stars and fashion models by the time he was 18; just a few years later he confessed to raping and murdering a friend of his former girlfriend's.
The dark twin of last year's celebratory "Dogtown and Z-Boys," "Stoked" chronicles the rise of skateboarding both as a punk-rock, outlaw cultural force and, ultimately, as a billion-dollar industry. Caught in the vortex of rebellion and commercialism was Gator, an aggressive, arrogant, physically gifted teenager from Escondido, Calif. With his wild hair, broken teeth and in-your-face manner, Gator fascinated legions of young fans, who watched him swoop, twirl and dominate the vertiginous wooden ramps of the skateboard world in the early and mid-1980s.
When he signed an endorsement deal with Vision skateboards and sportswear, the money followed -- lots and lots of it -- and he became increasingly uncontrollable, drinking too much, getting into fights and engaging in troubling bouts of what a therapist might call "testing behavior." "I'm one of the most blatant and outspoken jerks in the industry," Gator says in a 1987 interview shown in "Stoked." No argument here.
The fall, when it comes, transpires with a sort of sick inevitability. Apparently Gator's story has been something of an urban myth in the skating community; using interviews with former friends, a former girlfriend, law enforcement officials and such skating stars as Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero and Stacy Peralta (the director of "Dogtown and Z-Boys"), as well as interviews with Gator himself (whose collect phone calls from prison are heard on tape), the filmmaker demystifies the legend and lays bare the far more ugly and, frankly, banal truth.
Stickler, who made the wonderful cult documentary "Andre the Giant Has a Posse," about guerrilla street artist (and skater) Shepard Fairey, shot "Stoked" on digital video and tries to give it a charge with visual effects and a punk soundtrack. But essentially it's a conventional talking-heads procedural, albeit one that reveals the violent shadow material of skateboard culture that was only obliquely addressed in "Dogtown." As in all contemporary psychography, there's a final diagnosis ("bipolar manic depressive"), and as in all pop culture confessionals there's an expression of contrition in the end -- one that sounds about as sincere as Dickie Roberts's final, fictional redemption. Despite Stickler's best efforts at putting his crimes into psychological and sociocultural context, Gator never emerges as anything but a blatant and outspoken -- and virulently brutal -- jerk.
Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (99 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor, language and drug references.
Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (82 minutes, at Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle) is not rated. It contains profanity and brief nudity.
