Rock Candy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Sugar Town opens with a wannabe rock star (Jade Gordon) making a list about how to achieve that status. Attending the Grammys with an old, paparazzi-attractive guy is high on it. Tony Bennett will do. Also Tony Curtis.

Don't bet against her. This kid will steal anything--a boyfriend, clothes, jewels--to get to the top. And don't bet against Sugar Town either. It's the kind of movie Robert Altman might make if he ODed on Elavil--a multicharacter comedy about the Los Angeles rock scene. Make that the trashed rock scene. For it's mostly about people who once had it, then lost it, but would like to find it again.

Central to Sugar Town, which was written and directed with casual aplomb by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, are the efforts of a new band, composed of old rockers trying to re-establish themselves. In the end, that comes down to getting one of them, played by Michael Des Barres, who is exclusively interested in teenyboppers, to sexually service a potential backer, the hilariously voracious Beverly D'Angelo. The look on his face when he discovers the joys of mature sex could serve as the emblem of this sweet-tempered movie, which eventually touches--wryly, knowingly, forgivingly--on at least a dozen lives.

Mostly, they all--including the likes of Rosanna Arquette, Ally Sheedy and a lot of people who, like the characters they play, deserve to be better known--get what they want. Or at least manage to make the right compromises. Like the lives it recounts, Sugar Town comes to no resounding conclusion. But that indeterminacy is part of its seductiveness, part of its truth.

--R.S.