'American Gigolo' makes Jon Bernthal a bad date: TV review

With its throbbing hum of Blondie music and cold aesthetic, Paul Schrader's 1980 film "American Gigolo" is a centerpiece of what was soon to be the Reagan decade. Some 42 years later, a TV adaptation feels lost in time and seeks an argument for its existence.

Starring Jon Bernthal and with a pilot written and directed by "Ray Donovan" David Hollander (whose links with Paramount Television Studios were cut during production), "American Gigolo" is lead-footed and lustful rather than exciting.

And Bernthal seems here in the open sea, an atypical look for a star whose coiled charisma gave him elsewhere well served. His Julian Kaye - whose name is shared with Richard Gere's character in Schrader's film - emerges from a 15-year sentence which we are told happened around a decade and a half ago, but nothing about Julian's world feels today, or Earth. Julian, we understand, was wrongly convicted; Rosie O'Donnell's Detective Sunday tries to find out what really happened, while a whirlwind attraction between Julian and Gretchen Mol's Michelle threatens Julian's chances of finding a balance after prison.

Possibly because of Hollander's dispatch (with Nikki Toscano ultimately serving as showrunner), there seems little definition of vision here. O'Donnell, for example, is an excellent performer (and one we've been lucky enough to see more recently), but she doesn't match the anomic, moody energy that Bernthal exudes. The story - with flashbacks featuring Gabriel LaBelle as a younger version of Julian and Melora Walters as his mother - tends to confuse darkness with insight. And using "Call Me" as the theme song feels less like an homage than an attempt to recreate 1980s sleaze, absent any other dominant aesthetic.

But there is so much that could be done with this present moment! In its first three episodes, this show's analysis of its subject stops at acknowledging that sex work exists, and then ogling its subjects' bodies. (In this flat depiction of sexuality, at least, it's reminiscent of the cold-blooded erotic thrillers of the "Body Double" era, if only accidentally.) An unbiased look at the sex market has already been do. Notably, Starz's "The Girlfriend Experience," itself a remake of a movie, took the story of a sex worker and her entanglements, but set that story in a thoroughly contemporary setting, in which digital surveillance and the shattered attention span of the modern worker has presented surprisingly tacky new challenges.

This "Gigolo" doesn't make that argument for his own revival, or none. His case for himself is the promise of a glimpse of Bernthal's torso - impressive enough, but a sad thing when stripped of the actor's usual edgy brilliance. Here, it seems headed for a heartbreak that the rest of the show compensates for, amplifying the intensity of the couplings and the drama's loop to make us feel something more than a kind of disconnected lust. But, at least early in the series, the character is neither knowable nor possessed by the bubbly charge of unknowability. Unfortunately, it's just a boring date.

The first episode of "American Gigolo" will launch on streaming on Friday, September 9 and air at 9 p.m. E.T. on Sunday, September 11.

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