Insider Secrets

“I’m a big fan of blurring the lines between art and life anyway,” says Sean Lennon. Indeed, his new album, Friendly Fire, revisits the real-life love triangle that formed when his former girlfriend, Bijou Phillips, had an affair with his best friend since childhood. When the friend, Max Leroy, died in a motorcycle accident in 2005, Lennon decided that, in lieu of sitting and stewing, creativity would be his best hope of reconciling his feelings of anger and betrayal with his regrets over never having buried the hatchet with Leroy.

Friendly Fire plays both as an album and as a series of short films set to the music that together form the complete narrative as Lennon experienced it. Interestingly, though Lennon has obviously achieved peace since these events took place (he dedicates Friendly Fire to Leroy and even casts Phillips to play herself), the album/film dwells fairly close to his emotional state at the time. It ends with only the slightest trace of resolution, which, as a gesture to a departed friend, gives the work more resonance than if Lennon ended it on a brighter note. On the other hand, though Lennon does get his pain across with minimal adornment or melodrama, there is something perverse about watching a bunch of thirtysomething, over-priveleged artists from the highest echelon of celebrity re-enact their dirty laundry in public.

“I think it made it more meaningful to actually have Bijou and I doing it,” explains Lennon. “I could have cast someone else to play my character and also to play Bijou’s, but I don’t think it would have been as meaningful.”

Though it screams out at you while watching the film that the opposite is true: that the whole thing would have packed more power had Lennon selected others to play the two central roles. But you can’t really blame him for reflexively falling prey to narcissism. He is, after all, the product of life lived entirely based in art but uprooted from art’s vital connection to the day-in, day-out rhythm that dictates the average working person’s existence. Celebrity offspring—though it sounds jealous to say so—are actually deprived in that they can’t make this essential connection when they make art themselves.

Lennon doesn’t help his cause by stuffing his film to the gills with gorgeous celebrity women. This decision, without the unapologetic because-we-can swagger that, say, a Duran Duran or David Lee Roth might have brought to the table, confuses and dilutes the point Lennon is trying to make. Worse, even while attempting to bring gravity to serious subject matter, the Friendly Fire cast wallows in its own glamour as if its members know of no other way to carry themselves. It makes you wonder how they manage to empathize with real people when they have to play them. But let’s not forget, they’re not playing real people here, and yet they expect us to relate. What is most amazing, then, is that Lennon and director Michele Civetta (also a childhood friend of Leroy’s) succeed in doing just that on the sheer strength of imagination. The film deftly deviates from its main storyline and pursues several abstract diversions that repeatedly intertwine. It’s a testament to Lennon and Civetta’s artistic abilities that they tie them all together without sinking the project in self-indulgence or maudlin bulk. Instead, Lennon’s grasp of the ambiguity of the situation and desire to give himself over to a higher compassion wins the day. He skillfully avoids working with primary-color emotions—never just angry or just sad—but layering each scene with multiple tones. One particularly endearing sequence takes place on a roller-skating rink in the early ’80s with Lennon playing a class nerd who gets help from a girl with a magic ring.

Since Lennon calls on his friends so much and openly resists the machinations of self-promotion, a live show is practically guaranteed to be an informal affair swarming with the same people who appear on the album and film. Whether the show suffers from inherent scenester-ism, Friendly Fire nevertheless emerges as a work that’s built to last.

Dec. 19. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $20/$22.