A Forgotten ’80s NYC Movie Is Back, Scuzzier and Better Than Ever

Once upon a time in the Lower East Side… a writer-director frustrated with the Hollywood waiting game started shooting a scrappy indie film in his neighborhood. The story revolved around a seen-it-all narrator who talked like he’d stepped out of a dime-store paperback (“That summer in the city started like every other — right after winter”) and had a fondness for the good ol’ days. Back then, the character’s band 3-Legged Dog was all the rage, and he walked those city streets like a conquering hero. Now, he’s just another manic-depressive schnook trying not to get kicked out of his pad, restocking jukeboxes in bars and hanging out with local characters like his upstairs neighbor, an expat he calls the Brooklyn Canuck: “Her heart was still in Canada, but her voice belonged in jail.”

The LES was past its No Wave glory days, but its hipster bona fides were still evident when you went into the dank clubs and dingy bars and corner bodegas. Still, all those “for lease” signs showing up at the director’s old haunts pointed to where the ’hood was going. Or, in the word’s of the antihero he’d dreamed up: “Around here, the more things change… the more they change.” So the guy grabbed some actors and an avant-garde filmmaker who was also a crack cinematographer, and made a movie that captured the place he called home before it disappeared. It ended up winning a prize at Sundance, back in the days before the film festival was overrun by red-carpetbaggers. A few years later, the Anthology Film Archives gave it a decent theatrical run. Then the guy started a pizza joint and the film faded into obscurity.

A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making, and Philip Hartman’s No Picnic doubles as a chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era — of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking, of an alternate version of the “greed is good” go-go Eighties. Watching this gorgeously grainy black and white hang-out movie from 1987, fresh off an amazing restoration from the good people at the Film Desk and a premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s “To Save and Project” mini-fest, is to step back into a moment before gentrification terraformed Alphabet City and priced out the bohemians.

Anyone looking for a plot in this half-hearted attempt at a neo-noir parable may be missing the point. There is a kinda-sorta narrative, about our protagonist, Mac (played by David Brisbin, in the key of jaded and bemused fuck-up), chasing down a mystery woman in a photograph, with piercing eyes and a period-appropriate bob haircut. But Hartman’s odd blend of Raymond Chandler’s pulp fictions and Jim Jarmusch’s poetically shambling Stranger Than Paradise — then only a few years old but already an Amerindie landmark — is more of what the kids call a “vibe,” marinated in the sort of monochrome moodiness you find in Robert Frank photos and vintage underground movies. Peter Hutton’s cinematography makes everything look both shadowy and strangely inviting. Details like the marquee on the St. Marks Cinema and a poster of Mets third baseman Hubie Brooks (“Hubie Doobie Doo”) hanging above the bathtub located in Mac’s kitchen carbon-date the movie beautifully. The Lower East Side’s Please Kill Me-style history is represented by Richard Hell, who contributes a song to the soundtrack and shows up in a cameo. The DIY future is represented by a baby-faced Steve Buscemi as a passerby who accidentally starts Mac on his quest, and an even more baby-faced Luis Guzmán as the resident voice of reason. You’d never know this was the same NYC that gave us the Odeon and Patrick Bateman.

Hartman would make one more movie after this, an oddball 1997 indie called Eerie that further attests to his eye for incubating talent — you almost wouldn’t recognize Will Arnett and Felicity Huffman as a boat captain and a downtown poet, respectively. Hartman’s real legacy would be founding Two Boots Pizza, which remains an institution that bridges the Lower East Side’s distant past and its ever-changing present. No Picnic, however, deserves a place in the bigger-picture story of New York filmmaking. This scrappy memento mori is getting a week-long run at Film Forum, a venue that occupies its own well-earned space in the New York cinema hall of fame, before hitting the road for a brief tour. Check it out before it slips away a second time.