Film review: Studio 54

Watching this outstanding film is an exhilarating, immersive experience. As the music pulsates, the heady atmosphere of the iconic nightclub pours out from the screen, drawing you in to its glittering sanctum.

Matt Tyrnauer’s (Valentino: The Last Emperor) documentary chronicles the rise and fall of Studio 54 and its creators: two Jewish best friends from Brooklyn, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell. Tyrnauer evokes the era with rare and unseen footage as well as compelling interviews with people involved in its inception and operation, including waiters, doormen, makeup artists and family members. Rubell died in 1989 from AIDS related complications and Schrager, speaking about the club for the first time in forty years, recounts his story with candour, admitting that, “It doesn’t sting how it used to.”

Post Vietnam, pre-AIDS New York was a dangerous, corrupt and sleazy city but, at the same time, a thriving disco club culture emerged. Studio 54, New York’s mid-town, infamous nightclub captured this zeitgeist and would come to epitomise the excess, creativity and bohemianism of the late 1970s. In its short 33-month history, Studio 54 was the epicentre of hedonism, a magnet for celebrities, drug-fuelled partying and casual sex. But inside its vast, theatrical space it was also a place of freedom and total acceptance. According to musician, producer and Studio 54 regular, Nile Rogers, everybody was fine with everybody for the first time: gay, straight, trans, drag queen, black, white, young or old. “Its diversity created combustible energy,” describes Schrager.

Schrager and Rubell met as students in college. Rubell was an extrovert who knew how to schmooze: by contrast, Schrager was the introvert, “the invisible man.” Schrager’s father, known as Max the Jew, worked for the mob but the impact this may have had on him is unexplored - one of the few weaknesses in the film.