Citizen Kane-ish journalistic investigation into the disappearance, twenty years past, of a New Jersey rock-and-roll singer. Did he really go to the bottom of the river with his '57 Chevy, or did he pull an Arthur Rimbaud? (Why else was his final unreleased album titled Season in Hell, and why else, on the fateful night, was he heard to say, "If we can't be great, then there's no sense in ever playing music again"?) He has emerged of late as a cult figure, a maker of music proclaimed to be "ahead of its time," and certainly he seems to have foreseen (or foreheard) the music of Bruce Springsteen. The appreciation of Presley Era rock-and-roll does not go much beyond what can be plundered from Springsteen, however. Or at any rate, the repeated use of a very few pop songs gets in the way of any additional development of story or character. The least that can be said for the songs, as in the same moviemaker's Lords of Flatbush, is that they are original. The most that can be said is that they are bearable. With Tom Berenger and Michael Paré; directed by Martin Davidson. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd