Alphabet City

Alphabet City

“Alphabet City” is the first teenage gangster movie. We’ve had movies before where the kids were gangsters, but this is the first movie where they’ve taken all the clichés from those black-and-white Warner Brothers gangster classics of the 1930s, and crossed them with punk, angst and James Dean. The result is one of the silliest movies of the year.

The movie’s about Johnny, a 19-year-old kid who is, we learn from the movie’s publicity releases, the “King of Alphabet City.” That’s the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the avenues are named after letters, and every street corner has a drive in drug dealer.

Johnny is some cool guy. He is a collector for the mob. He torches buildings even the one his family lives in. He intimidates the owners of nightclubs where he is too young to be served. He keeps his lieutenants in line. He’s so busy that it isn’t until halfway through this fairly long film that we get around to mentioning that he has a wife and baby daughter somewhere up there in New York someplace; she’s an artist with a loft in SoHo. Granted. Life has been full for young Johnny; his most remarkable achievement growing up in Alphabet City and becoming a drug dealer without getting hooked himself may be his least believable.

We have seen mean streets before at the movies, which were not any safer then than they are now (not even for actors). In Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” Harvey Keitel played another Italian-American kid who was also collecting for clueless mobsters uptown; only Scorsese knew Little Italy from inside out or vice versa (he grew up there), knew that Keitel should play him thick with guilt and incompetence and scared witless just trying to act like he wasn’t scared witless: Keitel killed in that movie, but the last thing we could believe was Johnny as king of streets where real gangsters don’t feel safe walking down any more than he does himself.

But never mind. This is not social realism; it’s an impressionistic fantasy, directed by Amos Poe, who once made an underground film named “Subway Riders” that did a wonderful job of evoking the loneliness and terror of the streets. In “Alpha­bet City,” he makes the whole city into a set design, bathing the night streets in lurid neon colors and allowing his characters to throw shadows that are three stories high.

Fine, except that John­ny, the inhabitant of this Edward Hopper world, somehow loses his way about halfway through and wanders into a routinely-plotted exploitation film. There’s a scene where he has to save his wife and child from the Mafia. He kills some guys in an elevator and runs away with them on his trail until finally a guy on a motorcycle rides to their rescue at just exactly the right moment.

Johnny is played by Vincent Spano, who is such a good actor that it’s almost cruel to see him trapped in this movie (maybe you remember him from “Rumble Fish” or “Baby It’s You”). There are other interesting performances: Michael Winslow as luded-out street dealer friend; Zohra Lampert as Johnny’s weary mother, doing ironing while latest slob lover snores on sofa. These actors might have been able to make something of their characters in another movie. Here everything is smothered by concept.

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