Cinematic Addict: "Personality Crisis: One Night Only" — The Eternal Flame of David Johansen

Martin Scorsese lenses a celluloid valentine to the once-and-future New York Dolls frontman, capturing the lion-in-winter performing his hits as Buster Poindexter.

You can’t talk about rock ‘n’ roll’s underdogs without the New York Dolls, perhaps the greatest of those unsung heroes we love. And you can’t talk about the Dolls without David Johansen. Personality Crisis: One Night Only, Martin Scorsese’s love letter to the Dolls’ frontman, feels like a communion—between a punk-glam legend, an iconic filmmaker, and every one of us who ever found salvation in lipstick-smeared chaos.

The film centers on a single night in 2020, with Johansen performing at Café Carlyle, an upscale joint that’s almost antithetical to the filth and glory of Mercer Arts Center or Max’s Kansas City. But that’s Johansen—a contradiction, a performer who’s equal parts gutter poet, suave lounge lizard, and opera enthusiast. Here, he’s stripped down but not washed out, bringing the same fire and arch Bohemian shrewdness that sparked the Dolls’ heyday. He’s all wit, vulnerability, and barely restrained sarcasm here, cycling through songs that cover the distance between his Dolls days and his Buster Poindexter reinvention, never once dropping the intensity.

But calling Johansen a chameleon doesn’t do him justice. Scorsese’s film flashes like witnessing every skin Johansen has worn—from glitter-streaked New York punk savior to Buster, and all the mud and the blood and the spangles and the feathers in between—peel away to reveal the raw nerve beneath. Johansen, for all his reinventions, has always been punk’s eternal soul: unfiltered, funny, and, above all, undestroyed by time.

The Café Carlyle—a swanky venue traditionally reserved for jazz crooners and the dinner-jacket set—seems like an odd backdrop for this film, and the performance. But that’s Johansen for you—upending expectations, giving a performance that feels part séance, part confession. Here, he’s singing the same songs he once belted in sleazy rock clubs, but now with a new weariness and wisdom that cuts deeper. When he takes on “Personality Crisis,” the irony’s rich and self-aware, and you can feel every year and every bruise he’s carried to get here.

Similarly, the documentary is anything but a softening. Scorsese and co-director David Tedeschi frame Johansen as both a survivor and a symbol of what New York was when it was raw, messy, and real. It’s the NYC of Taxi Driver, which explains why Scorsese was the perfect director for this project. He and Tedeschi built this film like an echo chamber, bouncing between grainy footage of the Dolls tearing down stages in the early ’70s and Johansen now, a lion in winter who still manages to roar. The film feels alive, less like a retrospective and more like a punk requiem—a reminder that Johansen and the Dolls lit a fuse under rock ‘n’ roll that hasn’t really gone out.

Scorsese, with his sharp eye for New York’s underbelly, doesn’t romanticize Johansen, but he does understand him. This isn’t just a film about a rocker getting older; it’s about what happens when the music’s most defiant voices refuse to fade. Scorsese treats Johansen’s legacy with reverence but doesn’t flinch from showing his complexity—how a man who seemed born to throw grenades at convention could also slip into the Buster Poindexter persona, snickering at himself even as he filled ballrooms with “Hot Hot Hot.” The documentary traces this thread of contradiction, honoring both the Dolls’ unhinged roots and the smooth-talking survival instinct that kept Johansen going.

For fans, Personality Crisis delivers the goods, yes, but it’s the spirit of this film that hits the hardest. Scorsese digs deep into Johansen’s struggle between loyalty to the Doll’s ethos, one Johansen himself at times seemingly tried to deny, and the need to survive in an industry that’s attempted erasing the band’s legacy at every turn. You watch Johansen perform “Frenchette” or “Lonely Planet Boy,” and it’s like he’s tapping into every shattered dream and love affair of a life spent dodging the mainstream, then courting it under a different persona. He’s a rock ‘n’ roll Houdini, slipping out of the noose of obscurity again and again, demanding that we remember. Or maybe he’s an undercover agent from the underground, piling his hair into a pompadour and sipping on a martini in order to report back that it’s all dogshit, like we all suspected?

It’s that smirk—half amusement, half disdain—that defines his defiance. Beneath the humor lies a deeper truth: Johansen has always known how to play the game while never truly joining it. It’s not just survival—it’s rebellion in its slyest, most self-aware form, a reminder that even when the world tries to smooth out the rough edges, there’s power in refusing to lose your shape.

If there’s a misstep here, it’s that Scorsese, in his reverence, almost makes Johansen too saintly. Sure, he’s a legend, but the Dolls’ appeal was their beautiful, unapologetic messiness, and Johansen himself has never shied away from his flaws. In fact, his performances practically revel in them—irony and self-awareness coursing through every smirk and sly aside. That’s what makes the omission of his role in the Dolls’ demise so glaring. Johansen’s art embraces contradictions; the film would’ve only benefited from doing the same. The narrative feels tidier than it probably should.

Personality Crisis still feels like getting let in on a secret—the kind whispered between New York misfits who came up in the shadow of Max’s and CBGB, where the Dolls were the beating heart. Johansen gives you a wink and nod, shows you his sketchbooks, his Maria Callas 78s. His voice in this film transcends nostalgia, to protest against a world that forgot rock’s primal scream. You get a sense of the Dolls’ fire but also the toll it took, as Johansen reflects on the band’s early days, the friends who didn’t make it, and the wild spirit that somehow still fuels him. It’s personal, punk, and surprisingly tender.

Johansen himself would probably scoff at anything too polished. But that’s a minor critique. Personality Crisis does what it should—it leaves you feeling like you’ve been punched in the chest, grateful and aching for a time when rock ‘n’ roll still felt like revolution. Even as Scorsese’s camera shines a more refined light on Johansen, the edge is still there. The voice is still hoarse, the laugh is still sly, and, just like the Dolls, Johansen is still defying what anyone expects of him.

In the end, Johansen’s the last man standing, and his voice in Personality Crisis is a defiant, triumphant call to remember: the Dolls weren’t just a band; they were a line in the sand. And for those of us who know what that line means, who’ve lived and loved with New York Dolls and Too Much Too Soon as our soundtracks, this film isn’t just about one night—it’s about a lifetime, both ours and his.

Johansen may be singing to a different crowd these days, but his message hasn’t changed: rock ‘n’ roll isn’t dead. As long as he’s standing on that stage, with every beat and every snarl, the revolution that was the New York Dolls lives on.

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