Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco is less about the nightclub scene in 1980s Manhattan and more about the people that inhabited the clubs and locales. It isn’t so much about the end of an era as it is an exercise in pretentiousness and posturing seemingly for the sake of it.
The Last Days of Disco is another in a sort of unofficial series of films by Stillman, with the first two being Metropolitan and Barcelona. In those two pictures, as with Disco, Stillman explores the lifestyles of what he calls the “doomed Bourgeois” as they fall in and out of love with each other and with their lives. The stories generally center on a group of recent college or law school graduates.
Disco is no different, with Stillman unfolding a meandering and chatty tale about Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Chloë Sevigny). They are two recent Ivy League college grads and work at the same publishing house, pining for a better line of work with more pay. Alice and Charlotte are friends by convenience more than anything else, having not really liked each other in school. They eventually gravitated to one another thanks in large part to working in the same place and become partners in partying.
Alice and Charlotte frequent a Studio 54-ish nightclub during the dying days of the disco tradition. Alice is the smart one with good moral quality (apparently), while Charlotte tends to have a lot of trouble with impulse control as she frequently puts down her “friend” and says whatever’s on her mind.
The club remains the central meeting point of The Last Days of Disco, as other characters float in and out of the mix complete with necessary pretentious qualities. There’s Des (Chris Eigeman), one of the club’s managers, Des’s friend Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), Alice’s “love interest” Josh (Matt Keeslar), and the environmental lawyer Tom (Robert Sean Leonard).
Keeping track of all the fresh-faced young men in The Last Days of Disco can be problematic for those new to Stillman's chatty arrangements, as they tend to melt together into various diatribes about changing times, whether or not they’re actually yuppies, the meaning behind women’s breasts, or how a Shakespearean quote should best be interpreted.
Stillman’s script certainly works to provide some interesting moments as we watch this group of people conduct the business of their lives through various encounters and conversations, but The Last Days of Disco fails to really get off the ground in any meaningful way. One feels like an observer of a group of people acting smart for the sake of it, using twisting and turning phrases to exemplify concepts that they barely understand and barely actually feel.
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