LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA Movie Review

Finnish wunderkind Aki Kaurismäki has built an international reputation with ironic, deadpan comedies like Ariel, The Match Factory Girl, and Drifting Clouds. His 1989 Leningrad Cowboys Go America was Kaurismäki's version of a “breakout” film, designed with enough physical comedy and bizarre sight gags to get wider play in the U.S. than his usual art house engagements. But Kaurismäki seems to be both too cynical and too gifted to be a successful panderer, and his hysterical Leningrad Cowboys played to nearly empty theatres here, despite his best efforts at selling out. It's the story of a Finnish rock band called Leningrad Cowboys, who sport hep gray suits, lethally pointy shiny leather boots, and outrageous, mile-high pompadours. Their music is as terrible as their look, so they decide their best chance at stardom is to go to America, where “they'll listen to anything.” Leningrad Cowboys is the story of their American “tour”; it's a less raucous, hallucinatory This Is Spinal Tap, in which most of the laughs are muted, and stem not from a Finnish-American culture clash, but from the Cowboys' cultural clash with the rest of the human race. If you either don't get it or do get it and wish you didn't, this could be the longest 79 minutes of your life. On the other hand, if you find the movie funny, as I do, you'll want to watch it repeatedly, as I do. It features the late Matti Pellonpää and Kaurismäki's American counterpart, Jim Jarmusch. You'll also want to catch the Leningrad Cowboys' astonishing, already legendary 1994 hour-long concert film, The Total Balalaika Show, in which good-time standards like “The Volga Boatman,” “Knockin' on Heaven's Door,” and “Happy Together” are hilariously demolished for all eternity.

NEXT STOP … The Total Balalaika Show, Stroszek, Mystery Train

1989 (PG-13) 78m/C FI Jim Jarmusch, Matti Pellonpaa, Kari Vaananen, Nicky Tesco; D: Aki Kaurismaki; W: Aki Kaurismaki. VHS, LV, Letterbox ORI, FCT