New York underground rock of the 1970s was sung off-key and played on cheap instruments, immortalized in black-and-white photos so grainy the camera lens might as well have been a beer bottle. My memory of CBGB’s acoustics even by the 1980s resembles an insanely over-amped construction site.
The most distressing bad choice in “CBGB,’’ a movie entirely composed from them, is that those brilliant songs are repurposed studio recordings. Everything’s lip-synced by too-pretty actors, like Sting’s daughter Mickey Sumner as Patti Smith — shown here with snow-white shirt, dewy skin and petal-pink lipstick. This isn’t CB’s, it’s a karaoke bar.
“CBGB” is a biopic about the club’s grouchy owner, Hilly Kristal (Alan Rickman), a man with a glare that scared the wits out of generations of patrons. But Rickman’s default mode is suave, not grouchy. Wig or no wig, his silky line delivery and half-lidded eyes suggest he’d be more at home in Le Bernardin.
The atmosphere around this club is — God help us — pure John Hughes teen romp. In place of punk’s howling rage, you get gross-out jokes that include at least a half-dozen close-ups of the poop from Kristal’s bowel-challenged dog.
The desultory plot mostly shows Hilly’s daughter Lisa (played as a screechy nuisance by Ashley Greene) trying to clean up Dad’s bookkeeping — darkly amusing to anyone who followed the brawl over Hilly’s estate after he died in 2007, but otherwise not much of a hook. His wife Karen, a familiar sight in the club for years, isn’t on-screen.
So much is strangely slipshod; even the notorious look of the 1970s subways is ignored.
Another irritant: cutesy name-tag graphics like “Tom Verlaine,” used to identify the actors playing dress-up. This era was not about helping out the audience. Punk didn’t give a flying unprintable noun what you did or did not get.
In his 2012 “Lucking Out,” old-school CBGB habitué James Wolcott tells of the night John Cale tried to choke him for misunderstanding a beer order. Cale isn’t shown in “CBGB,” and it’s just as well. There’s no telling what he might have done to this movie.