Bright Lights, Big City (film)

Bright Lights, Big City is a 1988 American drama film directed by James Bridges and starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, Phoebe Cates, Dianne Wiest and Jason Robards, based on the novel by Jay McInerney, who also wrote the screenplay. It was the last film directed by Bridges before his death in 1993.

Synopsis

Originally from Pennsylvania, Jamie Conway (Michael J. Fox) works as a fact-checker for a major New York magazine, but because he spends his nights partying with his glib best friend (Kiefer Sutherland) and his frequent cocaine abuse, he's on the verge of getting fired by his boss, Clara Tillinghast (Frances Sternhagen). His wife Amanda, a fast-rising model (Phoebe Cates), just left him; he's still reeling from the death of his mother (Dianne Wiest) a year earlier; and he's obsessed with a tabloid story about a pregnant woman in a coma. The movie captures some of the glossy chaos and decadence of the New York nightlife during the 1980s and also its look at a man desperately trying to escape the pain in his life.

Bright Lights, Big City

Bright Lights, Big City may refer to:

See also

Bright Lights, Big City (novel)

Bright Lights, Big City is an American novel by Jay McInerney, published by Vintage Books on August 12, 1984. It is written about a character's time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. The novel got its title from the Jimmy Reed song of the same name.

Plot

The story's narrator is a writer who works as a fact checker for a high-brow magazine—likely based on Harpers or The New Yorker, where McInerney himself once worked as a fact checker—for which he had once hoped to write. By night, he is a cocaine-using party-goer seeking to lose himself in the hedonism of the 1980s yuppie party scene, often going to a nightclub called Heartbreak.

His wife, Amanda, recently left him, and he copes with this by pretending nothing happened and telling no one that she's gone. The two had met in Kansas City; the narrator moves with her to New York City, where she begins a modeling career that quickly takes off. After flying out to Paris for Fashion Week, she calls the narrator to inform him that she is leaving him for another man and to pursue her career. Initially hopeful that she will return someday, the narrator eventually resorts to searching for her at a fashion event, publicly humiliating himself while failing to garner more attention from her than a brief look. He obsesses over every item she owned in his apartment, every modeling photo and every club she visited, even repeatedly visiting a mannequin based on her. His partying and his personal troubles begin to affect his work. He eventually comes to realize Amanda's superficiality, becoming both disillusioned with her and the materialistic culture of New York in general.