Starstruck
JAYMES DURANTE
A teenage punk rocker dangles from a tightrope between two Sydney skyscrapers, journalists and bystanders ogling nervously from the ground below. She’s wearing a rainbow cape, a yellow leather harness and two humungous, scene-stealing prop breasts. This madcap scheme – yes, it’s planned – is the brainchild of her fourteen-year-old cousin Angus (Ross O’Donovan), who’s also her manager. The aim: a spot on the evening news, a naive, last-ditch attempt at musical stardom. The singer is Jackie Mullens, played by the indomitable Jo Kennedy in her feature debut. The film is Starstruck (1982), Australia’s first rock’n’roll musical, directed by Gillian Armstrong three years after My Brilliant Career (1979), the stunning success that shot her to industry fame and instantly onto the top rung of Australian film directors.
That a cinematic work as raucous and unabashedly fun as Starstruck has been largely forgotten by the public is as much due to marketing and distribution difficulties as it is to the many strange and sometimes confusing frictions that the film presents us. It trades out the trendy, identity-prodding analyses of its contemporaries – Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980) and Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981) – for aesthetics and attitude, and yet many at home deemed it simply too Australian for wider appreciation. It is kitschy and at times chaotic, recontextualising the musical form as a cartoonish music-video extravaganza, but its bare-bones narrative is borrowed from a simple Hollywood formula as old as sound cinema itself. On occasion, Starstruck seems in conflict with its own parts: between its brassy, scene-stealing protagonist and her bratty male sidekick, both vying for the film’s spotlight; between its director, whose personal stake in the project was her reputation as a distinctly feminist voice in cinema, and its writer, a musicologist and Hollywood obsessive whose upbringing is largely the stimulus for the screenplay.
Few of these conflicts compromise the film; rather, they enhance it in odd and unexpected ways. Though it was a local success at the time of its release, some of Starstruck’s eccentricities complicated its commercial rollout and have since stifled its longevity, making it overdue for a critical and commercial reconsideration that doesn’t solely and simplistically frame it as an achievement for women’s filmmaking in Australia, an auteurist position that severely underplays the equally significant contributions of screenwriter MacLean, lead actor Kennedy and the production’s immensely talented team. This is to say nothing of Armstrong’s own skills as collaborator and adaptor, which enabled her to swerve dramatically and unexpectedly from the course that many expected her to follow after the success of My Brilliant Career.
Putting on a show
Starstruck follows three simple, familiar narrative strands. The first involves Jackie’s pursuit of stardom: her hit performance at the Lizard Lounge, a red-lit late-night venue, has given her a taste for more. Angus devises the aforementioned tightrope stunt to get the attention of Terry Lambert (John O’May), a television presenter who hosts the Countdown-esque The Wow! Show. She books a slot, but, in a moment of individualistic abandon (or perhaps diva-dom), ditches her band, The Wombats, and its guitarist, love interest Robbie (Ned Lander), opting for a stripped-back performance that flops on live television. The second strand follows Jackie’s romantic escapades. We see her early in the film rolling about in bed with Robbie, but it’s Terry who really catches her eye. After she falls from her tightrope and into the latter’s arms, the two seem relatively smitten, but it’s only later, in a moment of musical kitsch perfection when she realises that Terry is gay, that she comes to see what she had in the first place with Robbie. The final strand gives the film its propelling force: Jackie’s mother, the glamorous pub proprietor Pearl (Margot Lee), is told by the brewery
