I had heard of this 1991 Brad Pitt movie Johnny Suede, but hadn’t ever seen it until it hit Criterion this month. I was mixed on it. The good is that it’s an offbeat indie film where Brad Pitt plays an aspiring musician who wants to be a neo-rockabilly star, with a big pompadour (that Johnny Bravo was modeled after) and some black suede shoes literally drop into his life. He’s trying to get his tape around to make it big, but the bad is that he’s not that interesting. His songs are OK, but Johnny himself is so thick and so dumb that he barely has any personality in the music, he’s basically just imitating Ricky Nelson without bringing anything new.
The other good parts are a semi-cameo by Nick Cave as a local music guy with a high white pompadour who belts out some good a cappella singing, and Catherine Keener was fun, bringing some real world snarky attitude as a normal person amongst a lot of the heightened reality types in this. Samuel L. Jackson appears very briefly as a guy in Johnny’s band.
Brad Pitt ends up talking more like his character in Cool World, in that 1940s/1950s jazz hipster way, and in Johnny Suede, looks like when his character becomes a cartoon at the end of Cool World.
The director Tom DiCillo went on to make a much better movie with the indie movie satire Living in Oblivion, where James LeGros played a pretentious actor that was allegedly a stand-in for Brad Pitt because DiCillo hated his acting and thought he made Johnny Suede more stupid than childlike.
So I liked finally getting to watch it, it’s just not that good aside from some quirks, the Nick Cave cameo, and Catherine Keener’s performance.
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