Movies with experimental narratives serve serial killers and famous slayers well. Despite varying levels of quality, movies as disparate as “Taxi Driver,” “Summer of Sam,” “Bobby” and “Zodiac” cast spells from mesmerizing to admirable — all hinged on explosive moments of violence.
Writer-director J.P. Schaefer goes the “Taxi Driver” route with “Chapter 27,” a claustrophobic drama that gets uncomfortably into the head of Mark David Chapman, the lost-soul Texan who murdered John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, after stalking the ex-Beatle outside his residence at the Dakota in New York City.
The film is filled with voice-overs taken from interviews with Chapman (who remains in Attica serving 20 years to life), and it’s tough to spend an hour and a half inside his fevered imaginings, but actor Jared Leto gives such a gripping portrayal it’s equally hard to look away.
Leto (from TV’s “My So-Called Life”) gained 50 pounds to play the then-24-year-old Chapman, who arrived in New York in fall 1980 pawing a copy of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and battling voices in his head.
Checking into a fleabag hotel, he befriends a dippy fellow Lennon fan, Jude (Lindsay Lohan). Chapman imagines signs pointing him toward his and Lennon’s shared destiny, and, putting himself into the head of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, deems Lennon a phony. Decoding coincidences and signs, Chapman believes it’s preordained for him to be where he is and do what he’ll do.
Like any work of fiction that takes its words and mood from a madman, “Chapter 27” is often dizzying, with leaps in time and logic that try to mirror its subject’s mind-set. When it settles down, though, the film is more obvious: Chapman’s evening with a prostitute is empty and awkward; a coffee shop conversation with the too-obviously named Jude intentionally echoes the tangential chat between Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd in “Taxi Driver.”
Lohan, for her part, tries again for some indie cred but ultimately comes off like an empty vessel.
Though “Chapter 27” — the title is meant to suggest a coda to “Catcher,” which had 26 chapters — unreels at times like an MSNBC special, Leto’s drawling, blotchy, creepy performance sets it apart, especially from last year’s less effective “The Killing of John Lennon.”
It’s a transformative role, but how widely seen it is depends on how strong a stomach one has for wall- to-wall paranoid ravings.
“Chapter 27”
R for language and some sexual content. 1 hour, 24 minutes. Directed by J.P. Schaefer; written by Schaefer from a book by Jack Jones; starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander. Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.
