Student- and blue collar-friendly before developers squeezed it out, Billy’s Topless on Sixth in the Twenties was one model for Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales script, though after New York Film Festival press screening, the director dripped irony about not naming names, or even city, since “in this day and age you wind up in court.” Known for controversial, tough, often New York City films, the New York director now based in Italy recounted that similar-background Martin Scorsese had laughed so hard when told this newest effort would be a comedy, “my first intentional one.” The trick, Ferrara added, lay in taking “the very difficult life, harsh reality” of go go bar-cabarets and giving it humorous treatment.

Star Willem Dafoe begged to differ, in that it was “a totally invented place I don’t think existed, basically a one-set movie,” shot at Rome’s Cinecittà with lots of improvisation freedom given to the linguistically mixed cast. Sylvia Miles, the story’s impatient obscenity-spewing Lilian Murray, questioned even improvisation: “just behavior,” really, normal reactions she likened to asking who’s there in answer to a knock.

Cassavetes was subsequently invoked by several on the panel, but the effort to categorize Go Go Tales as somewhere between that icon’s home movie-ish The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and show-biz joke Broadway Danny Rose, was puff. This personal homage to types and places given way to gentrification masked as moral cleanup is nothing more than a vignette, a slight one at that.

With stock stick figures running around screaming, punctuated by flat jokes about bulb-snatching for a coffin-like tanning bed that shorts out or “gourmet kitchen” pigs-in-a-blanket or the hoary one of a misplaced lottery ticket, the tale is furnished no room in which to maneuver. Dafoe’s Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge is a dysfunctional family affair, and a certain amount of modelly female flesh -- European, clearly not bigger-boned and –bosomed milk-fed American, a lady pointed out to me -- wiggling on laps or poles, is homey more than raunchy. It comes as a surprise when the place appears to close on Thursdays, only to admit older, more staid patrons waiting on line to applaud the girls and other employees as after-hours cabaret magicians in tuxes, ballerinas in tutus, mugs in togas and whatnot out of some awkward, long lost Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour.

Last and least bearable of the kitsch parade is brother Johnie Ruby (Matthew Modine), the beauty parlor “king of coiffure” of Staten Island, plunking a tiny tinny piano to “little Loopy” lapdog like poor uncomfortable Elvis to an uncomfortable Steve Allen hound dog. The unpaid working girls have bills and husbands to take care of, too, but the Lysistrata walkout fomented by Debby (Stefania Rocca) fizzles to nothing. Infatuated with new exotic dancer Monroe (Asia Argento) and her own doggie act, Johnie is nevertheless decided to pull the financial plug on brother Ray’s bankrupt dream, as landlady Lilian will on the physical premises so that dependable Bed Bath & Beyond can move in.

Chefs, bartenders, bouncers and loungers and greeters and seaters rush around in imitation of Damon Runyon, particularly the loud Baron (Bob Hoskins) and ineffectual Luigi (Franky Cee), but to no avail for story or audience. What is a one- or two-joke shtick stretches on, interrupted now and again by loveably brogued accountant Jay (Roy Dotrice) in search of the boss’ lost winning ticket and by the boss snoozing behind a baby blue sleep mask, looking pensive or hammily introducing acts.

All rise and must converge into Ray’s office, where, against a propless backdrop, Dafoe’s stage monologue insists that everyone has an American dream, “Happy Talk” or “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” stuff -- girls, Asians, blacks, blue collars, suits, tough guys and medical students and losers, and no one more than the owner of Ray’s Paradise.

Aside from maybe condoning compulsive gambling, this is no more than an explicit tack-on leading to an expected though not eagerly awaited deus ex machina finale. Nostalgia and comedy out of his system, Ferrara should now go back to the familiar turf that he has often served so well. 

(Released by Bellatrix; not rated by MPAA.)