"Desperately Seeking Susan" Review

 Following last week's spin of The Linguini Incident, the missus & I decided a trilogy of 1980s Rosanna Arquette movies was required and thus our second stop was 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, a shaggy dramady most notable for being then-megahot pop star Madonna's Big Movie Debut as the titular (in both meanings) Susan and its inclusion of her hit "Into The Groove."

Arquette plays Roberta Glass, a young New Jersey housewife married to Gary (Mark Blum, Mozart in the Jungle) who sells bathtub spas, saunas and hot tubs. She's obsessed with personal ads in the paper headlined "Desperately Seeking Susan" (roll credits!) to arrange meets between Susan and her boyfriend Jimmy (Robert Joy, CSI:NY).

Meanwhile we meet Susan in a hotel room where she's been shacked up with some guy not Jimmy who's passed out after a long night of getting into the groove, if you follow. She orders room service, steals the silverware and towels, and a pair of big earrings. As she leaves the room, she passes a creepy guy, Wayne (Will Patton, Armageddon), who's heading for the room. She arrives at the Port Authority bus terminal, stashes her drum case-turned-suitcase in a locker by jimmying the lock, to avoid paying. She puts on one of the earrings and leaves the other in the case.

When Susan meets up with Jimmy in Battery Park, Roberta is watching and after Jimmy has to take off with his band for a gig in Buffalo she follows Susan around the city and when she trades her distinctive jacket for some boots, Roberta buys the jacket and discovers the key. Wanting to return it, Roberta runs her own Desperately Seeking Susan ad to set up a meeting, signing it "A Stranger," which concerns Jimmy because who's trying to meet his girl who was banging a guy who fell out of a hotel window the day before and some priceless Egyptian earrings were involved.

Jimmy calls his friend Dez (Aidan Quinn, Reckless), a movie projectionist, and asks if he'd go to the meet to make sure Susan's OK, describing her as a blonde with a distinctive jacket. (Getting where this is going yet?) One thing leads to another, identities are mistaken and things are complicated by Roberta getting lightly bonked on the head, losing her purse and her memory, and with Dez calling her "Susan," assumes that's who she is. Hijinks ensue.

Whereas The Linguini Incident was a haphazard attempt at a screwball comedy, Desperately Seeking Susan is a lackluster, tonally off mess with a patchy screenplay and unlikable characters. I know this is heresy for older Gen Xers who are nostalgic about it because they aped Madonna's thrift store trampy style of mesh tops, exposed bras, rubber bracelets, etc., but the truth is the script by Leora Barish (making her screenwriting debut here and whose only other script of note was her last, 2006's Basic Insinct 2, so hackery was the constant) both relies on viewers overlooking the gaping plot holes and logic gaps, but also have no knowledge of how human beings behave.

The problems start with Susan herself. I don't think I've seen DSS since the 1980s and pretty much all I could I remember about it was Susan was a jerk and, yep, she still is. She's a thief, a tramp, and a sociopath, but because she looks and acts like Madonna, we're supposed to be smitten with Susan. Yeah, no. I was a teenager who thought Madge was hot while having a squeaky voice and bought both of the competing Playboy and Penthouse issues with her pre-fame nude modeling photos in them, but Susan still sucks.

Arquette is, well, Arquette. The fact Roberta ends up at one point as a magician's assistant ties neatly into her Houdini obsession in The Linguini Incident, but her character is as thin as her skull apparently is as she gets conked into forgetting who she is then rebooting back into her Roberta self later. While it's understandable that she'd boink Dez since he looks like Aiden Quinn, the fact he does her when he think's she's Susan, his bro's girl, and does so about five minutes after bailing her out of jail (where she'd somehow been busted for prostitution) was randomly abrupt and he's a bad bro.

It's more interesting spotting actors in early roles such as John Turturro, Richard Edson, and Giancarlo Esposito several years before they were in Do The Right Thing, Laurie Metcalf, Steven Wright, and a slew of art scene folks like Anne Carlisle, John Lurie, Richard Hell, and Ann Magnuson.

As a time capsule of mid-1980s New York with lots of big names before they were big names and Madonna totally loving herself, Desperately Seeking Susan may serve a purpose. But as a movie unable to decide what it's about and how it goes about it, it's less successful.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.