Studio 54 may be a traditional rise-and-fall story, but this film has an unusual focus on the period of reflection that tends to follow. ‘We rose and fell together,’ Schrager says, absent any of the animosity that you’ve come to expect from narratives like this one. Remembering the blow-out party the two friends threw at the club on the night before they went to jail, Schrager can only laugh: ‘When I look back at it now, it is so preposterous. What were we thinking?’

Matt Tyrnauer‘s film is resonant because it offers such a reasonable and poignant answer to that question. Tyrnauer, in a roundabout way that never quite tips over into dull reverence, suggests that Rubbell and Schrager weren’t wrong to tilt at windmills and pursue a dream that could never survive the morning. Schrager says that ‘it was fun holding onto a lightning bolt,’ and this film loves him for that. He and his late partner were only at the reins of Studio 54 for 33 months, but we’re still talking about what they did more than 33 years later. So, one imagines, maybe they were thinking that it would all be worth it in the end. And maybe they were right.” — from David Erlich‘s Indiewire review, posted at 12:45 pm.


Steve Rubell, Ian Schrager.