American Swing: Critic Reviews

A shrewdly made documentary about the rise and fall of Plato's Retreat, the infamous Manhattan sex club of the '70s and '80s.

Although American Swing pointedly goes out of its way to include positive testimonials from several women who patronized the club, it leaves you feeling queasy.

Though sweetly reminding us that some outer-borough suburbanites did find liberation at Plato's, the film tries -- and fails -- to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.

Directors Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman don't delve deeply enough into the psyche of club founder Larry Levenson or the culture he exploited. But they do present an entertaining snapshot of his brief reign as New York's self-appointed King of Swing.

American Swing doesn't have a particularly well-defined point of view, but it is a succinct, entertaining and valuable record of a time that in some ways now seems as remote as the Roaring '20s.

The film treats Levenson's rapid descent as if someone had turned on the lights at a sex party: scurrying away with pity and irritation that the good times had to end.

Certainly, the sex was exciting, as well as controversial. But Plato's Retreat also represented an effort to think through the mores behind monogamy, to challenge assumptions and imagine an alternative.

The pearls of wisdom are best extracted from the minds of those who stood on the front line, people who walked into the seminal fluid line of fire and lived to tell the tale.

A scary reminder of the potentially-disastrous physical and emotional consequences of indiscriminate mating.

Can't get it up.

There's glossy surface engagement as an artifact snapshot of the sexual revolution, but everything about American Swing is only thumbnail-deep; it doesn't have, ahem, the rigorous thrust necessary to leave a lasting impression.

A poorly-done documentary that manages to make the phenomenon of swinging boring.

An essential document to the rich history of New York, "American Swing" is too short sighted for the vision of its controversial subject.

In the end, the impression isn't that much different from one given by the club's own hairy habitues -- lots of sleazy charm, pounds of gold chains and a smarmy shallowness that goes very, very deep.

A lively and moderately engaging documentary, but its lack of thorough explorations leave you feeling slightly empty, underwhelmed and yearning for more insights.

Interesting and concise documentary about the positive and destructive effects of casual sex.

Repetitive, narratively fractured, and padded with more hardcore inserts than hardcore facts, this amateurish documentary about the disco-era Manhattan sex club Plato's Retreat skimps on context and basic information. It's a fan site on celluloid.

American Swing could use the flair of similar portraits of disco-era debauchery like Boogie Nights or Inside Deep Throat, but it's even-handed in capturing the operation's ambition and hubris. Just don't bring an appetite.

American Swing is an entertaining, oddly affectionate portrait of Plato's Retreat's Larry Levenson, and a brash, grainy, warts%u2013and-all Polaroid of an era of sexual history.

Such a sociologically rich subject deserves better than a reductive K-tel treatment.

The filmmakers never adequately confront the complex nature of the iconic locale.

And what of New York's disco-era gays? They're written out of the story here just as decisively as they were written out of Levenson's version of utopia.

The tantalizing combination of a(TM)70s New York nostalgia and public orgies at the infamous sex club Plato's Retreat fails to meet its storytelling potential.