'70s Punk

PAUL WILLIAMS: STILL ALIVE (Grade: B) (trailer)

Few celebrities so wholly embodied the crassness of the 1970s more than songwriter and "actor" Paul Williams. And who was a better poster boy for the evils targeted by the mid-'70s punk-rock movement than the man who christened the start of the decade and the end of the Beatles era by writing "We've Only Just Begun" for the Carpenters, the brother-sister duo who just may have been the Antichrists that Johnny Rotten was spewing about seven years later.

But who knew that Paul Williams was such a bad-ass? While the rock stars were choking to death on their own vomit, the adult-contemporary Williams was flying high as a kite guest-hosting the "Merv" show or inviting Peter Lawford onto the "Mike Douglas Show" so that they could score some primo coke in Philadelphia. He was rolling with Sinatra, winning Oscars with Streisand, and penning mega-hits for Kermit the Frog.

With his feathered Farrah blond locks and oversized glasses and platform shoes (he's listed at 5-foot-2, which is probably generous), the ubiquitous Williams seemingly never turned down a chance to ham it up on a variety show. And the cheesy hits just kept on coming throughout the decade: "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song," "Rainy Days and Mondays," "Evergreen," "The Rainbow Connection." But then the hits dried up and Williams desperately needed to go off somewhere and dry out.

Enter Stephen Kessler, a Williams fan since boyhood, to find out whatever happened to Paul Williams, now 72 and, yep, still alive. Kessler does an admirable job of capturing the phenomenon that Williams was in the '70s. We get delirious archival video of Williams being shot by Angie Dickinson on an episode of "Police Woman," doing pratfalls with the likes of the Captain and Tennille, yukking it up with Johnny Carson, and accepting his Academy Award for "Evergreen" from "A Star Is Born."

The documentary does a workmanlike job of telling a compelling story of a man wrestling with his past and struggling with sobriety. But too often, Kessler gets in the way of a good story with the bland conceit that the story here is the filmmaker's as well as the songwriter's. The director overreaches in the first half hour by overplaying his own relationship with Williams; he makes his subject seem like a crank, often ranting at the cameras like an old man shooing the neighborhood kids off his front lawn.

The filmmaking is generally clunky, and the narration at times is annoying. But in the end, this works, thanks to Williams himself embodying the inner turmoil of the long-faded superstar now 20 years in recovery and making the rounds of the has-been circuit. His hair is now short and spiky, and his glasses are small and round, and his face is wrinkled. Yes, he's often cranky, but his eyes convey the constant yearning to not so much reconcile his past as denounce it and escape it lest he go crazy agonizing over that younger version of himself.

At one point, the director sits Williams down in front of a laptop to watch a video from that guest-hosting stint for Merv Griffin, in which Williams is obviously tripping while mugging and riffing like a fool. Williams walks away, unable to watch the spectacle. The film then cuts to an interview with Williams, in full close-up, who explains it all this way:

"I wish I had a sentence to sum up all the stuff that I feel when I watch that -- and that could clean it up.  But I can't clean it up if I sit and I watch it again and feel the same way, and watch it again and feel the same way. It only happened once. But that horrific behavior that night got caught on [video] and now exists in zeroes and ones. And I can go back and get crazy about that anytime I want to; I just choose not to. I'm a different man. That behavior was totally unacceptable to me and the man that I am today. But it was also -- what really frightens me -- is to think that at the time I didn't have a sense of that going on. That I would just plow ahead and be like that and not have a sense of how arrogant and grandiose and shallow and ruthless an image of myself I was presenting. I don't ever, ever want to see that again."

It's a powerful revelation. It's a touching (if awkward) articulation of what I can only imagine is the moment-to-moment existence of a recovering alcoholic and addict. A profound observation from the man who once penned the line, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down" (inspired by his mom's life with his alcoholic father).

This is the low-key story of a survivor. Paul Williams the phenomenon has long faded into VHS obscurity. But the songwriter and performer soldiers on. According to recent reports, Williams is collaborating on a long-awaited new album from electronica heroes Daft Punk. Take that, Carpenters fans.

Paul Williams is a punk.

***

(Bonus Track: Here's Curtis Mayfield's version of "We've Only Just Begun")