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Michael Alig is a real person, the club kid at the centre of Party Monster. He currently resides in a real jail. Alig and his posse of celebrity wannabes reigned over the Manhattan nightlife scene a decade ago.
The problem with the film is that one needs to be somewhat interested in Alig, or in Alig's life, or in the generally overdressed New York club scene of the '80s and '90s, or in people like Alig who party hardy as their creative outlet, or in artsy, shaky, self-conscious filmmaking, or in watching Macaulay Culkin play a gay lost soul, or in watching current "It" girl Chloe Sevigny take drugs and widen her eyes because there's little else in this lame script for her to do, or in watching Seth Green have big, camp fun as James St. James, or in the lives of the deeply shallow, self-indulgent, unattractive people involved in this story.
If you're not interested in any of those things, Party Monster could be the longest 98 minutes of your adult life.
Culkin is embarrassing and unsympathetic as Alig.
The story is boring and tragic, but never so tragic that it stops being boring. The cast includes Dylan McDermott as the club owner who permitted Michael Alig to make a name for himself, Wilmer Valderrama as Michael's boyfriend, Wilson Cruz as the doomed drug dealer Angel, Diana Scarwid as Michael's mom, Natasha Lyonne as another club-kid hopeful and Marilyn Manson as an unfortunate thingy.
Filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have already made a film called Party Monster, which is an award-winning documentary about the life and times of Michael Alig. Why they pursued a feature on the same subject remains a mystery. They based this film on the book Disco Blood Bath by James St. James, Alig's mentor (sort of) and buddy on the club scene.
According to the production notes for Party Animal, the film is supposed to immerse the viewer in the world of Alig and St. James. Furthermore, Alig's character is meant to be complex and charismatic. As presented in this film, the world of Alig and St. James is inhabited by losers and is pathetic in the extreme, while Alig's character is needy and repellent.
If there's something more to learn about Michael Alig, his fabulous club world and the brutal killing of a drug dealer, it's not in Party Monster. Maybe you had to be there?
(This film is rated 18-A)