An ill-conceived effort to turn its leading star, Robin Johnson, into the female John Travolta, Times Square cannot be faulted for its failure to cash in on the Saturday Night Fever craze that took popular culture by storm in the late ‘70s. It was not without admirable aplomb that Times Square attempted to capture the punk movement in its zeitgeist, the way the Travolta vehicle did disco, despite its shortcomings.
Debuting in the fall of 1980, Times Square caught punk in its penultimate phase, just losing steam, but, in typical Hollywood fashion, misread the subculture through an abysmally nearsighted lens. If it were not for its magnetic lead, Johnson, once referred to by Courtney Love as the perfect composite of Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe, the film may have been consigned to the dust-collecting shelves of also-rans that include music-themed flops like Robert Greenwald’s Xanadu (1980) and Nancy Walker’s Can’t Stop the Music (ibid). Johnson, an accidental actor who struck an impression hard enough to ensure no other actor could ever fill her shoes as a punk provocateur, often carries a slack narrative with a shouldering dexterity that belied her young age of 15. Her performance in Times Square, the most dynamic element of the feature, often tussles with a slight story that can only seldom accommodate it.