All That Jazz (1979)

All That Jazz is an autobiography where the author clearly can’t stand the main character.

I’d been sleeping on Fosse for an embarrassingly long time. I knew the name, the jazz hands, the bowler hats, and somehow never connected any of it to how much of the last fifty years of movie musicals walks around in his shoes. All That Jazz is the one that finally made it click, and it’s now in the running as one of the best musical biopics I’ve ever seen. Maybe one of the best biopics, period. And the subject is the guy who made it.

Most biopics are too close to their subjects to tell the truth about them. They get made with the estate’s blessing, or the band’s, and you can feel the lawyers in every scene. Michael, The Theory of Everything, Bohemian Rhapsody: all of them play the hits and sand the person down until there’s nothing left to dislike. You’d expect an autobiography to be the worst offender. Who’s going to be harder on you than your own publicist?

Fosse, apparently.

Joe Gideon (Scheider, who is fantastic) is a Broadway director and choreographer editing a movie about a stand-up comic while staging a new musical. Fosse was doing exactly that, with Lenny and Chicago, when his own heart gave out in 1974. Every morning Gideon runs the same routine in the mirror: eye drops, Dexedrine, a cigarette, “It’s showtime, folks.” He cheats on his girlfriend (Ann Reinking, more or less playing herself), still runs to his ex-wife (Leland Palmer), and lets his daughter down in ways he clearly sees and does nothing to fix. In between, he flirts with Angelique, a woman in white played by Jessica Lange, who turns out to be death. He tells her everything. She’s the only person he’s honest with, and the only one who can’t leave him.

It’s one of the most self-loathing films I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s also funny as hell, which keeps it from being a slog. Fosse knows this guy is ridiculous: the womanizing, the endless rehearsals, the way he can’t stop staging his own life even while it’s ending. And the dance numbers are incredible. His hospital-bed hallucinations turn his own heart surgery into a variety show, and the finale, “Bye Bye Life,” is a full glittering production number about dying, with Gideon as the star and the audience applauding him all the way into a body bag. I can’t think of anything else that gets away with that.

The closest modern equivalent is Better Man, the Robbie Williams movie where he’s played by a CGI chimp, which I loved for the same reason. Williams signed off on a film that turns him into an actual animal. Both movies get that the only honest way to tell a famous man’s story is to let him be the worst thing in the room.

Fosse made one more film after this. He died in 1987, of a heart attack, on his way to the opening night of a Sweet Charity revival. All That Jazz was his rehearsal for that, and he played it for laughs and gave it a showstopper. It’s a film I can’t stop thinking about.

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