I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can Movie Review

Four years earlier she was An Unmarried Woman, now Jill Clayburgh returns to the screen in another oddly familiar role that would become synonymous with her career, as a woman struggling with the perils of modern life.

Here Clayburgh plays real-life TV producer Barbara Gordon, who was also a Valium addict. A spur of the moment decision leads her to quit, and after jitters and siezures she finally ends up near death, drying out in a rehab clinic. (If nothing else, Dancing enumerates exactly how awful Valium withdrawal can be -- as bad as heroin, so the film says.)

Made today, this would be movie of the week material, but through the jaded 1980s eyes of Jack Hofsiss it becomes a cautionary tale about drugs and a platform for Clayburgh's acting. Unfortunately for her that platform consists of little more than screaming and flailing about on the beach. It's a one note performance in a one note film -- but oddly it's a kind of time capsule for the way drug movies were made in te early 1980s, an era of Just Say No and Zero Tolerance and the glorification of the coked-out Hollywood executive. Though this is purportedly the flip side of that glory, there's still more than a little barely veiled hero worship here.

Take it or leave it, I guess.