(warning! here be spoilers!)
Ok, so in Delirious Tom Dicillo actually pulls off something that's really difficult to do from a storytelling perspective: he credibly transforms Les Galantine (played by Steve Buscemi) from a self-serving jerk to a nicer, more considerate person, and if that doesn't seem like a big accomplishment at first, try naming a few stories in which that happens. A Christmas Carol, Groundhog Day... I don't know if Delirious is one for the ages necessarily, but consider that it's far more difficult to write this kind of narrative arc than the "loss of innocence" kind. Loss of innocence is like rolling a ball down a hill. It's the way of the world, the way the cookie crumbles. Restoring a bottom-feeding paparazzo's faith in humanity, however, is a much trickier feat, so when Dicillo is able to change his protagonist from a hardcore opportunist into someone capable of real friendship, it's an admirable thing.
One of the first moments you know that Les isn't all bad is when he proudly shows a couple of candid photographs he took of Elvis Costello to his scruffy protégé, Toby Grace (played by Michael Pitt). It's also the moment that you realize Dicillo himself is probably a huge Costello fan, the second being when Elvis him-selvis later appears in a party scene.
From there we can infer that a lot of the fluff passing for pop music these days is distasteful to Dicillo on a soul-level, because he proceeds to spend a lot of his film lampooning it. One of the film's best moments is actually a music video embedded within the film. It's for "Take Your Love and Shove It," a song performed by a Spears-Lohan-Hilton amalgam named K'Harma Leeds (played by Alison Lohman). In a growing trend of directors writing their own music, Dicillo wrote the song himself—a biting parody of commercialized pop, but one that stops just short of being fully misanthropic. Sure, K'harma is taking her own overwrought sex appeal way too seriously and the video is unintentionally lapsing into camp as a result (cough, R. Kelley, cough), but Dicillo is also careful to give her a moment of straight emotional honesty when she looks directly into the camera and her words ring true. Maybe Dicillo is like Les Galantine: too appalled not to despise what pop has become, but too dazzled to look away. Delirious certainly isn't his first commentary on the human appetite for fame; in 1992 we got a Thelma and Louise-era Brad Pitt as Johnny Suede, a wanna-be rock star who figures out there's way more to life.
(That film also features a relatively unknown-at-the-time Katherine Keener, so clearly, Dicillo has a great a great eye for up-and-coming actors. Kristen Schall, for instance plays a lowly production assistant in Delirious and proves she can do a lot with even the smallest roles.)
To boot, Dicillo seems to be drawn to actors that have more than a casual relationship with music. Michael Pitt played a Kurt Cobain-like character in Gus Van Sant's Last Days and is also guitarist of real life band, Pagoda. Gina Gershon (whose performance here is a particular highlight) once released an album of jazz tunes and still pursues music enough to include a couple songwriting credits in her official bio. And while the music of K'harma Leeds might be little more than a pop confection, Alison Lohman herself is an accomplished singer with heavy duty musical theater credits, a fact that suggests the whole pop stardom thing is slightly harder to pull off than even Dicillo himself is suggesting.
Meanwhile, back in the real soundtrack, Dicillo and his talented music supervisor Tracy McKnight throw in some Dandy Warhols and of course a little Costello for good measure. Anton Sanko did a great job on the original score work, although some of it might have also been by someone working under the title "Ming+F5." The soundtrack information isn't listed on IMDB, so I can't really say for sure. In any case, the scene after Grace first spends the night with Leeds is beautiful stuff.
Go see Delirious, it's a fun yet substantive movie.
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