"The Nomi Song"

This worshipful chronicle of Klaus Nomi's evanescent career presents the '80s pop oddity as an utterly unique figure in music history. But that works only if you forget about Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich and all the other Weimarish, sci-fi—inflected novelty acts from the heyday of "new wave" gimmickry. (For those who missed it, new wave was a post-punk, pregrunge marketing paradigm involving synthesizers and heavily made-up people pretending to be from the future.)

A svelte, diminutive gay man with a plausible falsetto and a modicum of classical training, the German-born Nomi (born Sperber) immigrated to New York and, with the help of some buddies, developed a daffy little act blending opera, synth pop, impractical clothes and Sprockets-like performance art. It took off in New York and spread to Europe. Then, in the last 30 seconds of his allotted 15 minutes, Nomi died of AIDS.

Overlong by 40 minutes, this low-budget video conforms (as one of its talking heads observes) to the Behind the Music template, with success leading to betrayal of old friends followed by tragic comeuppance. Throughout, Nomi remains pretty much a cypher, though we do learn that he was generally a sweet guy, liked to bake, was kind to his mom and never doubted that the one-trick pony he was riding was built for the long haul.

A smarter filmmaker could have turned this into a clever piece of scenester sociology or a meditation on the lure of freakish fame. Anybody care to try again with legendaryChicago geek rocker Jim Skafish?—Cliff Doerksen