Bright Lights, Big City

Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie). To his credit, he never seems to be having fun as he journeys through club land. Few do, for long. If you know someone like Jamie, take him to this movie, and don't let him go to the john.

It may not capture Mr. McInerney's novel completely or even succeed in standing on its own, but it does go a long way toward bringing the book to life. If Mr. McInerney's readers think it incomplete, they should also find it enjoyably familiar.

An insipid '80s nostalgia piece really, held together by Fox's performance and several neat turns from his support.

It's hard to care much about Jamie Conway, an aspiring novelist who is dissipating his substance in New York on cocaine and parties: Fox hasn't the range to play anguish, so the explanatory voice-over is less a survival from the best-selling novel than a necessity.

Director Bridges coaxes nothing from his smooth-faced star, which is surprising in view of his previous films - Urban Cowboy, The China Syndrome, The Paper Chase - all of which had strong leads (John Travolta, Jane Fonda, Timothy Bottoms). Bright Lights, Big City is certainly an improvement over Bridges' last film, Perfect, but this material requires more intensity than Fox can muster. [5 Apr 1988, p.1D]

While Bridges is a capital stylist, "Bright Lights" needed a great deal more than style. (Real emotion, for one thing. Believability might also have been nice.) And while Fox is puppyish and charming, his character, Jamie, has to go through a real epiphany during the film's weeklong time frame and Mr. Fox is hard-pressed to suggest a two-Excedrin headache.

Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City was hailed as a portrait of the vacuous, coked-out '80s generation. The movie is simply vacuous. The script, also written by Mc-Inerney, strips away the novel's witty and ironic voice. What is left is a vapid yet sentimental cautionary tale about the evils of drugs. Of course, drugs are terrible. But so is Bright Lights, Big City. [1 Apr 1988, p.C1]