That '70s Club

By RICHARD CORLISS

From here, it seems that the most recent decade when folks looked really sharp was the '50s. Nice haircuts, good posture, a coolly casual clothes sense. Every decade since, as shown in the current glut of reflective movies, looks tacky, toadish, its own parody.

That's certainly the case with the late-'70s metropolitan New York division, in Mark Christopher's 54. We are yanked back to Studio 54, the trash-glam Manhattan disco where, for a few years, simply everyone who did anyone was desperate to be seen. They had a blast at this all-night carnival of drugs, booze, sex, and a lot of pretty people who tawked funny. And the funniest was 54's co-owner and host Steve Rubell, the Elsa Maxwell of sleaze.

In Mike Myers' droll, brave impersonation, Rubell is a starstruck lout, a user-abuser, seductively snaky, cheerily malevolent; he could be Lolita's Clare Quilty without the gaudy wordplay. It'd be fun to see a movie about this Rubell. Alas, 54 focuses on the kids who worked for him: Shane the blond busboy (Ryan Phillippe), Anita the coat checker (Salma Hayek) and other cutie losers. The film tries to toss Saturday Night Fever's bridge-and-tunnel dreamers into the '70s' hottest disco. But for that to work, you need verve, edge and Travolta. All those are absent here.

There's some fun seeing Canadians like Myers and Neve Campbell (as a soap-opera star) try out their lumpen tristate accents. And the music still has its innocent juice. But the film is just one more sound-track CD in search of a plot. Or maybe we're already sick of the polyester '70s. Why couldn't 54 have been the year instead of the club?

--By Richard Corliss