Critics reviews

The irritating and contemptible central character of Susan Seidelman's Smithereens, Wren (Susan Berman), is one of the most vivid heroines in the pantheon of 1980s cinema. She's a paean to the struggle of the creative impulse: demanding to be heard and recognized, and frustrated with the process of making something that's worthy of being recognized.

To return to Smithereens now, or ten years from now, is not so much to bemoan old, lost New York but to celebrate what it has always represented: a dream perpetuated in large part by the director’s own movie-mythmaking. The New York City Seidelman first painted in Smithereens was dusted in a little bit of fantasy, truer to spirit than it was to fact, which allows it to remain timeless.

Unlikeable protagonists—even those that have the additional bad luck of not being male—are nothing new, yet there's still something refreshing about the vainglorious antihero of Susan Seidelman's cult classic SMITHEREENS.

A fabulous time capsule, a cheerier cousin to rough contemporaries like Stranger Than Paradise, making the best out of a Manhattan landscape that looks practically bombed out... An astringent comedy, it's also a tough-minded sketch of a milieu in which women are expected to be perpetually silent disposable partners for male musicians, and of one woman whose dogged attempts to smash that glass ceiling has her sliding into monomaniacal solipsism.

The three leads (appealingly) lack slick acting "chops," to say the least, but there's a marvel of a bit performance by Katherine Riley as a depressed prostitute who lists her offerings from priciest to cheapest, ending with five bucks to see a scar "that's in a real interesting place.

The title comes from Eric's punk band, which is on the cusp of a big breakthrough that, the film insinuates, couldn't include Wren even if both he and she wanted it to. For this paralyzing vicariousness alone, Smithereens is as unsparing (and, as of 2016, accurate) a sketch of twentysomething life in New York City as American independent cinema has yet offered.

Seidelman's movie is canny enough to forestall facile nostalgia for those pre-Giuliani years, no matter how much we, thirty-some years on, may pine for (or fetishize) the chain-store-free city blocks Wren trudges, the rubble she navigates. For all the film's wit and verve, the latter quality manifest in the variety of musical idioms heard (reggae, new wave, postpunk), Smithereens has an inescapable dolorousness.

Wren, in her self-delusion, manipulativeness, and superficiality, easily ranks as one of the most obnoxious characters in film history, and she exerts a strange fascination. Yet Seidelman doesn't offer a very interesting perspective on her: her dislike of her character is so evident and uninflected that you soon start to wonder why she wanted to make the film at all.