1986's Modern Girls is a Kooky, Irresistible New Wave Cult Classic With an Utterly Beguiling Performance From Virginia Madsen
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The shockingly good 1986 New Wave comedy Modern Girls is the first non Bruce Willis 2021 movie I have seen in nearly two weeks. I was excited to finally be free of Bruce Willis so I was very amused that in one of her first scenes, Virginia Madsen’s character is shown reading an article entitled “Bruce Willis gets Serious.”
I can’t escape the man! He follows me everywhere! Thankfully, Bruce Willis’ unexpectedly showing up early in Modern Girls represents the only commonality between the cult comedy and Willis’ late-period output.
In sharp contrast to Cosmic Sin, Out of Death, Midnight in the Switchgrass, Survive the Game, Apex, Deadlock and Fortress, Modern Girls is a movie with a keen understanding of human behavior and the glorious idiosyncrasies that make us who we are. Also it’s good and funny and memorable, all qualities that distinguish it from the movies Bruce Willis cranked out in 2021.
I honestly had never even heard of Modern Girls before I saw that it was next on my journey through Virginia Madsen’s complete filmography but I was impressed to the point of being blown away.
Modern Girls would make for a terrific double feature with Electric Dreams in that they each perfectly typecast Madsen as a New Wave Dream Girl, an otherworldly beauty you can’t help but fall in love with.
I dug Modern Girls because I love the 1980s and, with the possible exception of the aforementioned Electric Dreams, Modern Girls might just be the most 1980s movie of all time.
The only way Modern Girls could be more 1980s would be if it featured a scene of ALF breakdancing while wearing a “Just Say No” tee-shirt and one sequined glove like Michael Jackson.
Modern Girls captures the duality of the decade it embodies in unusually pure form in the way that the clothes and hairstyles on display are simultaneously ugly and tacky and gorgeous and irresistible.
The film's intense 1980ness unfortunately extends to it being an observant, funny and melancholy exploration of female friendship and the universal hunt for a good time in which Madsen’s thrill seeker comes very close to being sexually assaulted multiple times. That’s how things were in the 1970s and 1980s: the question was not “Why on earth would you put a sexual assault into a movie where it is jarringly out of place?” but rather “why NOT put a sexual assault in every film?”
Modern Girls is consequently very strange film tonally, a wild night out female bonding movie that’s high spirited and filled with outrageous fashions and infectious, synthetic music that’s also deeply sad.
This is attributable largely to Madsen’s magnetic and unforgettable performance as a target of universal lust who can’t stop picking the worst possible men and ends up paying a price for her poor judgment.
Modern Girls casts Madsen as Kelly, a radiant and impossibly gorgeous pet store employee lusted after by every straight man who meets her.
Kelly has a date with Clifford (Clayon Rohner of Just One of the Guys), a dorky nice guy who dresses like a sitcom dad from the 1950s but she stands him up in order to hang out at a club with her asshole DJ ex-boyfriend.
Kelly’s roommates Margo (Daphne Zuniga) and Cece (Cynthia Gibb) convince Clifford to drive them to a club where Kelly is supposed to be waiting for them but they arrive just in time to see Kelly sucking face with a DJ who promptly gives her the slip.
Clifford is devastated but the night has only just begun. Cece falls instantly in love with Bruno X (Rohner in a dual role), a New Wave rocker equally enamored of her, only to be quickly separated.
The twenty-something pleasure seekers journey into the night in search of good times, sex, companionship and an escape from the banality and tedium of their everyday lives.
As the evening progresses, Margo finds herself attracted to Clifford’s fundamental decency while Cece strikes out on a quest to be reunited with her rock star paramour before he jets off to another city and she loses her chance to be with him forever.
At its best Modern Girls feels like a Los Angeles New Wave female version of After Hours, with the existential despair dialed down a little.
Like Steve Barron, the director of Electric Dreams, Modern Girls director Jerry Kramer comes from a music background. He worked extensively as a music video producer with Michael Jackson in the 1980s. Kramer’s most notable credit when he made his feature film directorial debut with Modern Girls was the blockbuster, Grammy-winning The Making of Thriller.
So it’s not surprising that Modern Girls is a quintessential rock and roll movie that moves to a jittery New Wave beat. Modern Girls epitomizes what’s wonderful about New Wave: the dark irony, fashions and infectious music.
About halfway through Modern Girls, Madsen’s breathtakingly beautiful lost soul takes Ecstasy. It’s just one of an endless series of bad decisions on her part.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a film from the 1980s where a character gets fucked up on Ecstasy, particularly a PG-13 rated comedy.
I’m similarly not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that gets what it’s like to be on Ecstasy on an emotional, spiritual and physical level.
Usually when a character is on Ecstasy in a movie or TV show the result is a cartoonish burlesque of blissed-out pleasure. It’s a joke pitched at squares for whom designer drugs are exotic and unknowable but Modern Girls gets it exactly right.
Madsen captures the tawdry exhilaration of the fake happiness that comes in an Ecstasy pill, that chemical-induced escape from sobriety and the dreary real world.
Kelly eventually comes around to the idea of actually dating Clifford, who follows her around all night like a lovelorn lost puppy. In an unexpected dual role Rohner is appropriately relatable and likable.
I had no expectations going into Modern Girls and was very impressed. If you love the 1980s, movies that take place over the course of one extremely eventful evening, Los Angeles, the music and fashion of 1980s New Wave and Virginia Madsen the way I do it’s definitely worth your time, particularly since it does not wear out its welcome at a brisk 84 minutes.
Unfortunately the movie, which bombed at the box office during its theatrical run but found an appreciative cult following thanks to frequent airings on cable television, is difficult to track down. It’s not streaming anywhere but is available on DVD.
Thanks largely to a radiant, nuanced and wildly charismatic performance from Madsen, Modern Girls is a real blast from the past, a funny and poignant time capsule worth digging up and checking out.
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