Watch TIMES SQUARE Before It Leaves the Criterion Channel

A cult favorite is yours... for the next two weeks.

New York City is dead. At least the New York City I grew up in, replaced with something less scummy and dangerous. This isn’t a bad thing, and it’s something that happens to New York with regularity - it transforms itself into a new phase, becoming a slightly new thing for the new people who live there. But as a native of its sleazier era I am homesick for a New York City that no longer exists. I left town long ago, but I was there to see the earliest changes happening - the subtle shift of Brooklyn from a place nobody wanted to go to the hipster center of the city, the cleaning up of Times Square, returning it to a tourist-friendly spot after decades of being apocalyptically rundown.

I was there at the tail end of the sleaziest era, too young to know New York City in the 70s. Even the nasty New York for which I am nostalgic is nothing compared to the rot that infected the Big Apple in the 70s, a decade when I was tooling around in a Big Wheel. The 70s are a legendary decade, especially for the City that Never Sleeps, and it was full of garbage and poverty and punk and malaise and blackouts and the Feds saying drop dead and excitement and sewer glamor and rock and roll romance. Before AIDS and crack, before the nation’s rightward lurch under Reagan, before John Hughes and Transformers. It was horrible, but it was iconic.

Some movies capture elements of this time, gritty New York films that give us a look into what those streets were like then. There are documentaries, of course, and they also give us a sense of the time and the place. But I believe there may be no movie that better captures this place and time, and no movie that better explains why it was so iconic, than Times Square.

It was hard to watch Times Square for a couple of decades. The movie, released in 1980, was a flop, and it kind of sunk away. The real impact from the film at the time was its soundtrack, put together by Robert Stigwood, the guy whose influence over pop culture in the 70s can’t be overstated. He managed the Bee Gees, he produced the original production of Jesus Christ Superstar and the Broadway production of Hair, and in the world of movies he produced Grease and Saturday Night Fever, the soundtrack to which on his RSO Records forever changed the movie soundtrack paradigm. He had hoped that Times Square would be the next Saturday Night Fever, but it wasn’t to be.

Now the movie is available on the Criterion Channel, but just for a few more weeks - it’s leaving at the end of the month. I cannot recommend enough taking the time before 2025 to watch this one. This movie truly encapsulates so much about the late 1970s in New York City, it has so much great music, but most of all it explains why a decade of failing public services and trash-strewn streets might be the greatest in NYC’s history - because in those circumstances existed a space for people who had no other space, who were the bizarre and the outcast, and they had the opportunity to build a music and arts scene that still influences us today. In that squalor was possibility.

Times Square is not a film for the more sensitive among us. It is of its era, and the language is not exactly up to modern standards. The original song Your Daughter Is One is an incredible track, full of real frustration and defiance, but the lyrics can be… yikes. Slurs abound, although used in good faith, I swear.

That song is sung by the Sleez Sisters, a band made up of the two girls at the heart of the story. And they are girls - star Robin Johnson was probably about 15 when the movie was shot, and her co-star Trini Alvarado (who would go on to play Meg in the 90s version of Little Women) was at best 14. Alvarado plays Pamela, the daughter of a wealthy city official, and she gets put into a mental ward, where she meets Johnson’s Nicky. The two immediately click and break out of the hospital and go on the run, living in a warehouse and doing odd jobs and becoming a band.

Because Pearl’s dad is a big deal, the story becomes news. It catches the attention of a late night radio DJ, Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry), who calls out to them on the air. When they arrive at his studio he puts them on live, and the Sleez Sisters become a sensation in the underground. Eventually they put on a huge illegal concert in Times Square, calling out for girls from all over the Tristate Area to show up: "If they treat you like garbage, put on a garbage bag. If they treat you like a bandit, black out your eyes!" Nicky says.

The movie is disjointed and long, but it’s also thrilling and inspiring. The performances are incredible; Curry is only in the film for a couple of scenes (he gets top billing, though), and Alvarado is terrific. But it’s Johnson as the foul-mouthed street urchin Nicky who is the most incredible, giving a performance that feels not at all like a performance. There is truth and honesty in her that is blazing with meaning. It’s one of my all-time favorite film performances.

So why have you never heard of her? Well, it’s because Stigwood saw what a talent she was and wanted to make her the next John Travolta, so he signed her to an exclusive deal that would not allow her to audition for other films or get other representation. She never got the call from Stigwood to be in anything, and she became a bank teller. She did some small work in movies like After Hours and TV shows like Miami Vice before she simply left the industry and became a private citizen.

Times Square was a big deal in music circles because of the soundtrack, but it was really the gay community that kept the film alive for decades. The central friendship between Nicky and Pearl is slathered in homoerotic subtext, which wasn’t supposed to be subtext. Director Allan Moyle (who directed another teen rebellion classic, Pump Up the Volume) says there was explicitly lesbian content that Stigwood pulled from the movie. The intention was always to have Nicky and Pearl be in love with each other and honestly, it’s super obvious they are in the final film. Unfortunately those deleted scenes were not kept, and as of now are lost to time.

Moyle actually left the movie before it finished filming, and so as you can imagine he has disowned it. The movie streaming on Criterion right now is not the film he wanted to make, but the film that was made is still one of the greats. In many ways the jankiness of the movie only enhances what’s on screen; the ragged nature of the Sleez Sisters and the world in which they live is reflected in the film itself.

I adore this movie. I adore the characters and I adore the music, I adore the almost documentary way in which it captures a seedy New York City and I adore its flaws. After all, real punk rock was made by guys who barely even knew three chords; being polished was never the point. The point was always to get across a real feeling and real emotion, as raw as possible.

In many ways Times Square is a perfect movie to represent its little era. It’s scrappy, it’s challenging, it’s a mess, but it’s full of power and possibility. It’s an outcast but that lets it speak to other outcasts, as it has done for the past 40+ years. For a long time Times Square was one of those cred check movies - if someone had seen it and loved it, you knew they were cool. Sometimes I feel uneasy when those movies go more mainstream or become more widely known, as if an element of the world in which I came up is being given away. I’ll admit, it’s a gatekeep-y attitude. But with Times Square it’s different. The film being more available is great, because that means more people who need to see it can. This isn’t a movie that’s for everyone, it will never become a cheap and easy meme. The film itself is its own gatekeeper, and it will open wide for the right viewer. Which is probably you.