Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones‘ Breaking Upwards (IFC Films, 4.2) is — no exaggeration — the best shot, best written, best acted and best-edited New York relationship drama made for $15,000 that I’ve ever seen. If it had cost $50,000 or even $100,000 I’d still be in the wheelhouse. I expected something a little rough or meandering, but it’s an unusually bright, engaging and robust little film for what it is.

At last night’s Breaking Upwards after-party (l to r.): Julie White, Pablo Schreiber, Andrea Martin, co-writer/director/costar Daryl Wein, co-writer/costar Zoe Lister-Jones, Francis Benhamou, director of photography Alex Bergman.

Wein and Lister Jones have based their co-written script (along with Peter Duchan ) on their own real-life history, playing themselves with Wein directing and editing. I heard at the after-party that it actually cost more than $15 grand but we’ll let that one slide.

It’s about a 20something couple going through the stales and looking to shake things up agreeing to give themselves some time off and maybe nookie around. Which of course puts Breaking Upwards in the same realm and even in a kind of quasi-competition with Katie Asleton‘s The Freebie.

Breaking Upwards is in no way cute or farcical in the mode of those idiotic chick-flick romances that the studios release in January-February (and which female Eloi support with way too much enthusiasm.) The script seemingly focuses on Wein and Lister-Jones’ actual social/work milieus, which means acting classes and West Village bike rides and Jewish gatherings and parental kitchen chats, etc. And the enterprise feels utterly genuine and authentic and perceptive within these perimeters.

Breaking Upwards co-writer/director/costar Daryl Wein, co-writer/costar Zoe Lister-Jones prior to last night’s IFC Center screening.

Honestly and no offense? Lister-Jones comes off as a handful and a bit of a snippy bitch. Wein hooks up at one point with Olivia Thirlby (Juno, The Wackness) during one of his roam-arounds, and as soon as this happened I was muttering “dude, go for it…take a chance on the new talent…Zoe is way more trouble than she’s worth!”

Which obviously isn’t an indication of any real-life judgment or observation on my part. I’m just saying that Lister-Jones comes off, fairly or intentionally or whatever, as prickly and bothered with more than her share of thorns.

Sincere and believable backup is provided by Andrea Martin as Zoe’s mom (“You’re needy, honey…you’ve always been very needy”) and Julie White and Peter Friedman as Daryl’s good-egg parents.

Alex Bergman‘s cinematography is clean and unfettered and well-framed, and Wein’s editing is fast and nimble and keeps the ball in the air at all times.

Here’s that Larry Rohter story about the making of the film that ran in last Sunday’s N.Y. Times. Good on Falco Ink for making this happen.

Star Trek‘s Zachary Quinto (i.e., Monsieur Spock) and two guys I didn’t recognize (sorry) at last night’s Breaking Upwards after-party.

So I loved Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass and the audacity of having an 11 year-old midget-sized girl murder dozens of bad guys with pistols and knives and swords, and I was also able to half-enjoy, at times, the suspended idiocy and self-referential absurdity that director Matthew Vaughn uses to explain away all the stuff that wouldn’t otherwise work and in fact would choke a horse.

Warning: Kick-Ass spoilers lie ahead. Spoilers, I mean, for those who haven’t watched the recent trailers and don’t know what the shot is and haven’t been to any comic-book action films over the last decade or so.

The problem for me is that hard-bodied, highly trained little girls like Moretz might be able to hurt or dodge or out-kick older heavier guys, but little girls are utterly incapable of whipping older, muscular, bigger-guys’ asses, and you can totally forget about these same whippersnappers wiping out several guys in one crazy-ass, stabbing, kick-boxing, balletic shoot-em-up and slice-and-dice. Even if you stretch physics like turkish taffy in an exaggerated fantasy realm, it’s completely ridiculous.

During the big finale Moretz’s Hit Girl becomes Neo in The Matrix. She wipes out 17 or 18 guys, if not more, and at one point dodges a bullet. (I think.) All comic-book action is lunacy, of course, but Kick-Ass takes things to a new extreme. It’s another exaggerated, self-mocking piece of ludicrous action pulp, only this time it takes you over the waterfalls. It’s not happening in a cyber-realm but a comic-book realm, which means that absolutely anything can happen and nothing matters. And yet in the minds of Vaughn and the geeks who are having kittens over this film, this is a cool way to go.

All they care about is the fact that Hit Girl rules. Which she does. I get that. I love Moretz in this thing. But we’ve come to a point in which the comic-book sensibility that allows her to run wild is ruining action movies. It’s been doing this for years, of course, but I was really fuming about this last night. “Where does this crap end?,” I was asking myself. “What’s next — a five-year-old action hero? How about a cat — not a cartoon cat Felix but an actual Siamese or Abyssinian or Tabby who shoots Glocks and beats the shit out of human hitmen and drug-dealers who are ten times his size and outweigh him by over 200 pounds? Why not?”

It’s gotten to the point that I’d like to arrest and incarcerate every last geek-pandering filmmaker and every last pudgy-bodied, ComicCon-attending comic-book fan and truck them all out to re-education camps in the desert and make them do calisthenics in the morning and swear off junk food and straighten their heads out about the real value of great action movies, and how their stupid allegiance to comic-book values is poisoning the well.

I’m sorry but Kick-Ass pushed me over the edge. I know I’m mostly alone on this. I understand that 94% of the mostly male, action-savoring audience is going to be more or less down with Kick-Ass and calling me clueless, etc. John Anderson, a very sharp critic and no slouch, was sitting in the front row of my screening and seemed to be half-chuckling and enjoying himself as the lights came up. I spoke after the screening to a respected critic for a well-known weekly, and even he was giving it a pass. I know it’s over. The temple walls are cracking. I realize that.

I’ve come to truly despise comic-book action flicks, and particularly the metastisizing comic-book sensibility in mainstream movies, for a reason. By this I mean the total disregard by comic-book filmmakers for setting up the rules and the reality system in which amazing things might happen within the world of a film. Just telling the audience “hey, it’s a comic thing” doesn’t cut it.

I am ready and willing to buy anything when I sit down for a movie. I will accept any bullshit premise you throw at me (even the idea of opening a small door, crawling through a mud tunnel, becoming John Malkovich for five minutes and ending up on the New Jersey Turnpike) as long as you allow me to buy it. Set it up for me…please! All I ask is that you pour the cement and bolt down the beams before making the film.

All the comic-book guys ever seem to say is “look, man…it’s cool to watch and it’s funny and has great CG…isn’t that enough?”

The current Comic-Con sensibility is primarily a product of (a) the Asian martial arts boom of the early ’90s, (b) the Quentin Tarantino hipster handbook (everything is smirky-ironic, all action is derivative and self-referential, violence is a style fetish, aping or referencing the sensibility of ’70s exploitation is a holy calling) and (c) the Robert Rodriguez B-movie, shameless-wallow sensibility in which macho action cliches are seen as eternally cool. Plus the influence of Marvel and Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the sad willingness of the faithful to cream in their pants for pretty much any super-hero of any kind.

All these influences have grown into an attitude and a sensibility that is working like cancer upon the action genre. For it’s not just comic book movies but all action flicks that are covered with this sauce.

Every year there are more and more comic-book/fantasy movies and directors and writers who are not only opposed to but actively doing their best to undermine the concept of action you can believe in. By this I mean action sequences (including physical combat/martial-arts moves) taking place in a realm that the filmmakers have carefully prepared and guided and persuaded you to accept as semi-trustable and “real” as far as it goes.

I’ll always be cool with smart metaphor actioners like The Matrix, but I’m worried that we might be moving into a world in which there will be very little allegiance or respect for the kind of violence that really hurts and bruises and is scary to face. A world in which guns fire randomly or accidentally (remember that bit in Out of Sight when the guy fell on the stairs and shot himself?). And has foot chases that involve fatigue and heavy breathing. And beatings that bear at least a slight resemblance to schoolyard or back-alley beatings that you might have observed as a kid in which guys don’t get clobbered so hard and so often that they’d be dead in reality, or at least maimed for life.

The vast majority of action films used to live by the realism creed. Now it’s pretty much the exception to the rule. Many if not most action films these days are committed to the willfully surreal if not absurd. They’re all angled towards aficionados of Asian sword-and-bullet ballet. We seem to be fast approaching a time in which the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire, Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games, Wiliam Friedkin‘s The French Connection, Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God and Alfonso Cuaron‘s masterful Children of Men will be seen as icons of a bygone age.

Comic-book action filmmakers aren’t fit to shine Cuaron’s shoes. They aren’t fit to wipe up phlegm that he spits on the sidewalk when he has a cold. All they’re fit to do is follow the system that we have in place in which the director of the next comic-book movie feels obliged and is in fact eager to top the last director of the last comic book movie, but always without setting it up — they just do it, knowing that the ComicCon and South by Southwest faithful will lap it up and yell “Yeeaahhhh!”

The South by Southwest reactions that I read about Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass (Lionsgate, 4.16), which I saw last night, buried the lede. The star of this almost sociopathic comic-book actioner isn’t Aaron Johnson, who plays Dave Lizewki, the lead character who invents a faux-super hero called Kick-Ass. The star is Chloe Moretz, the 13 year-old who plays Hit Girl.

Moretz, who’s 5′ 2″ but looks smaller in the film, actually plays Mindy Macready, the daughter of an angry but amiable vigilante named Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage). Hit Girl is Mindy’s purple-wigged alter-ego when she and dad (in the guise of a Batman-ish figure called Big Daddy) go on crime-bashing rampages.

Johnson’s character seems too wussy, too “gee-gosh,” too intimidated by everything. He looks scared or amazed all the time, and his mouth is always hanging open. But Moretz is the shit. She’s got spunk and sass and vertebrae of steel. And she’s not compromised by the fact that her Matrix-like fighting skills and multiple triumphs over able-bodied, full-grown men (particularly during the finale) are completely ludicrous. What matters is that Moretz has the character and personality of a super-tough chick who doesn’t mess around. Presence, conviction, charisma…got ’em all.

A guy asked if I’m buying an iPad this weekend. Certainly not, I said. For the reasons listed last night/today by N.Y. Times tech correspondent David Pogue. Which I’ve pasted below. No camera, no mutitasking, no flash, no USB receptacles, etc.

The guy mentioned, however, that “under the glass of the units that are shipping this weekend is a hole built specifically for a camera to be fit into the current device. Between that and other postings on the rumor sites for camera tech jobs at Apple, there’s no question that there will be a camera built into the next version.

That’s fine, I told him, but I’m waiting for version 3.0, not 2.0. Nobody with a connected laptop and a 3G iPhone really needs this thing. Not until 2012, I’m thinking.

There are two iPad models — wifi-only and wifi plus 3G cellular service. The one that goes on sale this weekend is wifi-only, but the one with 3G data will start selling in about a month for an extra $130 a pop. If you get the wifi-only, there will be no “internet everywhere” ability that people have on their iPhones right now.

Pogue’s shit list reads as follows:

“The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch.

“It’s a half-inch-thick slab, all glass on top, aluminum on the back. Hardly any buttons at all — just a big Home button below the screen. It takes you to the Home screen full of apps, just as on an iPhone.

“One model gets online only in Wi-Fi hot spots ($500 to $700, for storage capacities from 16 to 64 gigabytes). The other model can get online either using Wi-Fi or, when you’re out and about, using AT&T’s cellular network; that feature adds $130 to each price.

“You operate the iPad by tapping and dragging on the glass with your fingers, just as on the iPhone. When the very glossy 9.7-inch screen is off, every fingerprint is grossly apparent.

“There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces). And you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone.

“When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger). A $70 keyboard dock will be available in April, but then you’re carting around two pieces.

“At least Apple had the decency to give the iPad a really fast processor. Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast. Surfing the Web is a heck of a lot better than on the tiny iPhone screen — first, because it’s so fast, and second, because you don’t have to do nearly as much zooming and panning.

“But as any Slashdot reader can tell you, the iPad can’t play Flash video. Apple has this thing against Flash, the Web’s most popular video format; says it’s buggy, it’s not secure and depletes the battery. Well, fine, but meanwhile, thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad — places where videos or animations are supposed to play.

“YouTube, Vimeo, TED.com, CBS.com and some other sites are converting their videos to iPad/iPhone/Touch-compatible formats. But all the news sites and game sites still use Flash. It will probably be years before the rest of the web’s videos become iPad-viewable.

“There’s no multitasking, either. It’s one app at a time, just like on the iPhone. Plus no U.S.B. jacks and no camera. Bye-bye, Skype video chats. You know Apple is just leaving stuff out for next year’s model.

“The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money — with a full keyboard, DVD drive, U.S.B. jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works. Besides: If you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?”

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson reported yesterday that word ’round the Cannes campfire says that neither John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole nor Bruce Robinson‘s Rum Diary will be “done in time.” I hadn’t heard that. I’m sorry. That’s a shame.

I’m presuming, of course, that “not done in time” is a euphemism in the case of Rum Diary. Because it was shooting in Puerto Rico an entire year ago so…you know, c’mon. The film is apparently experiencing issues of one sort or another.

On the other hand Shoot Online.com posted a press release on 3.29 about Nina Saxon Design (which has composed Rum Diary‘s main-title sequence). It says that the film is “currently seeking distribution at the Cannes Film Festival.”

I purchased a download of Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3, and of course it didn’t acknowledge the existence of this software on the final download page. So I called tech support and the message said today’s a holiday and they’ll all be back at work on Monday, April 5th. Who gets April Fool’s Day off?

From here on no work holidays except Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, 4th of July and Labor Day. All the other piddly-dink holidays are hereby shit-canned. And no sending people home early when the weather acts up, as I explained several weeks ago.

To begin his New Yorker review of Leaves of Grass, David Denby has written a diagnosis of what he believes has been wrong with the choices made star-producer Edward Norton. Not a question of talent but judgment, he’s saying. And yet he’s basically saying “move it or lose it.”

“Edward Norton is a good actor and a busy man — a citizen who concerns himself with solar energy, affordable housing, the Maasai wilderness, peace in the Middle East, the High Line, the fate of the Mets’ outfield, and heaven knows what else,” he writes. “But he’s not quite a movie star, or the actor he could be.

“Early on, after a fast, Oscar-nominated start as an altar boy accused of murdering a priest in Primal Fear (1996), Norton played cunning lowlifes in tough little pictures. He was brilliant as Lester (Worm) Murphy, a reckless gambler and nihilist, in Rounders (1998), and then, muscling up, he turned Derek Vinyard, the swastikaed skinhead in American History X (also 1998), into a horrifyingly intelligent native fascist.

“Norton has blue eyes, a long, narrow chin, and an ironic smile that can suddenly turn intimate. He can be retiring and nearly bodiless, falling back from confrontation like a ghost; he can also be menacing and cold, hardening his baritone into a snarl. Like James Woods in films thirty years ago, he appears to think that he’s the smartest person in the room, and, like Woods, he uses that arrogance as a way of exposing the madness of egotistical characters.

“At the moment, movies could use more men like Norton — actors who can spread a little acid or a little light. If such high-domed performers develop an ingratiating way with women, they become stars, like George Clooney; if not, they usually subside into character roles, like Woods or Alec Baldwin. It’s not easy to be the smartest guy in the room.

“Norton, I think, has the charm, the courage, and the dimensions to take on great parts, but his career has wandered around in roles that have been off center without being good. He stood up to Brad Pitt‘s bullying in the nutty cult classic Fight Club (1999). He was the scientist with anger-management issues in The Incredible Hulk (2008), the kind of popping-veins extravaganza every actor should gratefully leave to Jim Carrey.

“Norton was then swanky in cravats, high collars, and an Anglo-Austrian accent in that thick wedge of Hapsburg cheesecake The Illusionist (2006). The accent got even more pinched and refined when he played a British doctor suppressing his personal sorrows and martyring himself to Chinese epidemics in The Painted Veil (2006), a frightfully noble picture that could have been made by MGM in 1940.

“These are not the best choices for an actor with an instinct for contemporary life. Action is apparently not to Norton’s taste, but he’s a natural for calculating power types and intellectuals — gangsters, lawyers, politicians, journalists, corporate and financial operators. He needs to find writers who will create roles for him as intelligent, troubled men, as Clooney has.”

At least 15 major critics and a few feature writers who’ve posted articles and reviews about Tim Blake Nelson‘s Leaves of Grass, a rowdy pot-dealing dramedy about twin brothers (both played by Ed Norton) with radically different attitudes, were surprised to learn today that First Look, the film’s distributor, has pulled the plug on a previously confirmed opening this Friday in New York and Dallas.

I’m told by 42West that “a buyer has stepped in and bought the film” with plans to give it a full-on release “sometime this summer.” A press release about this sudden turn of events will be released Thursday, the spokesperson said.

It’s still way curious for such a move to happen within days (hours almost) of a limited release.

Mark Olsen‘s 3.28 L.A. Times story about the film said it “opens Friday in New York City and Dallas with additional dates to follow,” but earlier today the regional 4.2 opening was removed from the film’s IMDB release-date page, and Box-Office Mojo changed its release status from 4.2.10 to “TBD.” Coming Soon also pulled it from its release schedule.

Amazon has the Leaves of Grass DVD/Bluray set for a 7.20.10 release. That’s obviously out the window with the new summer-release plan.

Here’s what I wrote about Leaves of Grass during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, Here’s Marshall Fine‘s review, and David Denby’s in The New Yorker.

There’s a bothersome element in this trailer for The Expendables (Lionsgate, 8.13). I’m talking about Sylvester Stallone‘s cosmetic eye surgery. I’m particularly referring to one or two shots that suggest the use of eyeliner, which gives his appearance — be honest — a slight La Cage Aux Folles quality. Tell me this doesn’t undermine the machismo.

Last night’s 8pm curtain of American Idiot meant I couldn’t see all of the Clash of the Titans press screening, which began at 6 pm. But I was mainly interested in the quality of the faux-3D, which was finessed after the film was shot in regular 2D. I hate to drop a bomb but what I saw looked too dark. It might not have been intended to look this way, but it certainly did at last night’s showing. Which means, given typical theatrical standards, that it’s likely to be projected too darkly from Augusta to Anchorage starting on Friday.

Clash‘s 3-D doesn’t begin to approach Avatar‘s 3-D presentation levels, and that, in my book, constitutes a burn.

We all know that 3-D films have to be presented with higher-than-normal brightness levels to compensate for the darkening effect that 3-D glasses bring to the viewing. That sounds like a no-brainer to me, but one of three things happened last night — (a) the projectionist running the show at the Lincoln Square didn’t understand this equation on his/her own, (b) he/she wasn’t told by Warner Bros. to increase the brightness levels, or (c) everyone knew exactly what they were doing technically but it didn’t matter because the Titans 3-D experience isn’t intended to be as good as Avatar‘s, and that’s that. Take it or leave it.

When I took my glasses off the light levels on the screen (which are measured in foot lamberts) seemed okay. Not up to SMPTE standards of 16 but maybe somewhere in the vicinity of 10 or 12 foot lamberts, I’m guessing. But when I put the glasses on it was like I was watching the film through Korean Rayban ripoffs — everything seemed diminished by low light and layered in a faint murk.

The solution, I guess, is to watch the 2-D version and forget the stereoscopic.

Avatar‘s great-looking 3-D created a steroscopic boom, but crummy-looking 3-D flicks like Clash of the Titans hurts everyone. It takes the bloom off the rose, especially with greedy exhibitors charging $14.50 to $20 a pop.

Titans itself isn’t as bad as others have been saying. It’s a decent thing as far as this sort of dopey, kid-level cinefantastique stuff goes. It’s certainly better than the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, that’s for damn sure. I watched about 55 minutes worth standing up (arrived late, no seats) and muttered to myself, “This isn’t too painful, could be worse, the dialogue isn’t atrocious, the actors aren’t bad, Worthington retains some dignity, the effects are reasonably okay, whaddaya whaddaya,” etc.

In other words it’s not, you know, a “good” film but it’s okay if you adjust your standards and put on your Robert Rodriguez hat and say “fuck it, I don’t care, bring on the Kraken” as the lights go down.

Complain all you want about the metaphor of blue-collar losers succumbing to nihilistic downswirl in American Idiot, the soon-to-open Green Day musical based on the 2004 album that Michael Mayer (partnering with songwriter/frontman Billie Joe Armstrong) has directed and co-authored. But you must acknowledge that the intense vigor, bullwhip discipline and visual-glam audacity that comprise the presentation of the show are knockout-level and totally top-tier.

American Idiot is something to argue about in terms of its vision and to perhaps feel irked by (a 23 year-old reminded me after last night’s performance that semi-hip pop-music lovers from his corner of the room despise Green Day, and that he doesn’t like the way the play portrays his generation), but it’s clearly a show and a half.

American Idiot opens on April 20th — three weeks hence — and will probably be well reviewed by a good chunk of the critics, and will obviously sell high-priced tickets hand over fist.

Call it a 21st Century rock opera that’s part Tommy/Quadrophenia, part Vegas flash, part Spring Awakening, part Rent and part shock-and-awe on a multi-media trash-culture set that rises a good 55 or 60 feet in height, and which features a large ensemble cast (under 25, energy to burn, backed by an onstage band) performing 21 Green Day tunes, some Twyla Tharpish dance moves, a striking aerial ballet on wires….forget it, okay? There will be no “meh” responses to the spunk and razmatazz of this thing.

American Idiot is going to be tour-bus Eloi central for the next several months, and a thing that pretty much all musical lovers will need to check out and confront. It’s a road show waiting to happen, and almost certainly a filmed musical in two or three years.

Going in I knew only that the show (based, as noted, on Green Day’s socio-political rock opera) was about three blue-collar guys with nothing in their hearts or skulls except a yen to submit to something strong — big-city distractions, heroin addiction, Iraq War combat, couch-potato vistas, early parenting — as a way to escape the nothingness of small-town life.

Green Day’s Tre Cool, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt.

Johnny (John Gallagher, Jr.), Tunny (Stark Sands) and Will (Michael Esper) aren’t creators or pathfinders. Building a life out of dreams or grit or drive (or at least a search for something transformative that might happen through college or travel or what-have-you) never occurs to them. They’re just three “let us outta here” bozos who get outta there and then get busted up and turned around, and who finally wind up back in their home town living lives of quiet tedium.

They reminded me on some level of the three fellows who go off to Vietnam in The Deer Hunter, suffer the odd horrors of that conflict and end up singing “God Bless America” over Thanksgiving dinner. Except the American Idiot guys (only one of whom actually serves in Iraq) end up singing “wow, we blew it…we thought we were bold and clever and different, and we’re not. We’ve become the complacent American idiots we started out despising.”

All through the 90-minute, intermission-free show I was saying to myself, “Wow…a primal, kick-out musical that I’m having a pretty good time with, and which feels at least moderately hip in its eagerness to provoke and not placate — a show with the nerve to make hay out of aimless American-youth ennui among the post-9/11, Iraq War-fighting generation.”

This nihilism gives American Idiot a kind of integrity, I feel. The show may misrepresent in this or that way, but it’s not my idea of a “lie.” I know a little about how things feel among suburban guys living lackluster lives (my late brother essentially died from this), and I can only presume that things are worse for uneducated “whatever, man” types from the thousands of backwater towns out there. It’s a bit of a drag to think about life in these terms. I wasn’t “with” these three characters, but I don’t have the stones to tell Mayer or Armstrong that they’re wrong — that things aren’t this grim for millions from this milieu.

In his 10.10.09 review of the Berkeley Rep production of American Idiot , N.Y. Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote that “mournful as it is about the prospects of 21st-century Americans, the show possesses a stimulating energy and a vision of wasted youth that holds us in its grip.

“And to ring a variation on the Woody Allen joke about sex being dirty if you’re doing it right, the only thing sadder than wasting your youth is not wasting it.”

Mayer and Armstrong deserve credit for hanging tough in their particular fashion. And here’s a standing ovation for Gallagher, Sands, Esper, and costars Tony Vincent, Rebeca Naomi Jones, Christina Sajous and Mary Faber.

Further cheers are earned by choreographer Steven Hoggett, music supervisor Tom Kitt, set designer Christine Jones, costume designer Andrea Lauer, lighting guy Kevin Adams, sound guy Brian Ronan, and video and projection designer Darrel Maloney.