Dead Letters

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

Michael J. Fox is a cute guy and a skillful actor. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was a cute novel and a polished one when it was all the rage four years ago. Wrapping them up together was not an entirely unreasonable movie-packaging idea. It arrives, however, looking like something that has been kicking around too long in the dead-letter office.

McInerney found a singular voice in which to recount the drugged out misadventures of a young man named Jamie as he wanders through the downtown Manhattan club scene at its early-'80s height. His book was written entirely in the second person and mostly in the present tense. But there are no equivalents to these devices in the grammar of film. As a result, his screenplay lacks the bite of his original fiction.

What is left onscreen is a faithfully translated narrative. Jamie loses his job, loses his wife, uses his friends, mostly in the pursuit of drugs. But his story is an attenuated one, and when it is told flatly, Jamie turns into a terrible twit, alternately superior and self-pitying, especially with a sympathetic older colleague (Swoosie Kurtz) at the New Yorker-like magazine where both work. The fact that his mother loved him but died does not really excuse him. The fact that Fox brings the sympathy he has won, and the comic elan he has perfected, on television cannot restore Jamie to our good graces. The fact that James Bridges is a hopelessly unimaginative director finishes Jamie off. In the wake of this film's failure, one begins pondering Bright Lights, Big City's last line on McInerney's behalf: "You will have to learn everything all over again."