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A morality tale for the disc-jockey generation

By Manohla Dargis
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Apr 22, 2005, Page 17

Back in the days of raves long-gone, the English radio DJ Pete Tong, a dance-music guru and the occasional subject of media profiles and gossip, was bequeathed an unusual claim on immortality when his name became part of Cockney rhyming slang. The phrase "It's all gone Pete Tong" is patois for "It's all gone wrong," and is now the title of a faux documentary about a DJ (not Pete Tong) who goes stone deaf.

In It's All Gone Pete Tong, everything that can go wrong generally does, mostly to surprisingly sweet effect.

The faux documentary has become such an established cliche that it even has a reigning auteur in the form of Christopher Guest, the prankster behind Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. The Canadian filmmaker Michael Dowse, who wrote and directed Pete Tong, is not a purist like Guest, who faithfully mimics the conventions of fly-on-the-wall-style documentary, thereby making a mockery of the form and its claim on the truth.

Dowse takes a less rigorous approach to his send-up, one that eases into faux documentary form principally during intermittent talking-head testimonials and some phony television bits. The rest of the time, the story assumes a more familiar fictive mode as it tracks the sideways adventures of Frankie Wilde, an Ibiza-based club DJ played with genuine heart and talent by Paul Kaye.

Taking a cue from Citizen Kane, a touchstone to which this film pays fleeting, cheeky homage, Dowse tells his story mostly in flashback. At the height of his fame and before his hearing went, Frankie lived in a mansion on the Spanish island, where he swatted away bikinied beauties by the dozen and ruled the island's cavernous clubs. With a body that looks like twisted-together pipe cleaners and a jagged yellow smile that speaks to the enduring excellence of British dentistry, Frankie makes a curious king of clubs. But he is royalty among these sun-drenched mortals, as well as catnip for groupies like his wife, Sonya (Kate Macgowan), and parasites like his manager, Max (a fine Mike Wilmot). As it happens, Frankie spins gold, not just vinyl.

When we first meet the DJ, he is in the grip of a mondo, a coke habit that would make a goner out of Al Pacino's Scarface Tony Montana. Coke builds Frankie up, giving him the energy to spin for thousands of flailing, cheering clubgoers, but it also brings him down, down, down. If Frankie's rise and fall do not yield any new truths about bad habits, it is because addiction often tells the same old sad story and typically leads to just two possible endings: recovery or death.

But It's All Gone Pete Tong is primarily a comedy, so it gives nothing away to say that Frankie's addiction is not really the point but the means to an unexpected end. That said, the fanged, stuffed monster that rides shotgun with Frankie during his binges is genius.

This fiendishly perverse homage to Harvey aside, Dowse plays it safe. Because he more or less stays within the parameters of the faux documentary (and the biographical picture), there is not much room for him to cut loose. He wrings soft humor from the usual sources, including a phony music video and different talking-head experts whose blathering turns out to be as clueless as it is essentially self-serving.

Mostly, though, he gives Kaye room to push at extremes as Frankie loses his hearing and then his grip. The British comic turned actor (best known for his satirical celebrity journalist Dennis Pennis) appears in almost every scene and he carries that weight admirably. He manages the very neat trick of keeping you interested in a character who does not merit our affection but earns it nonetheless.
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