LITTLE JOE

Little Joe is a documentary, plain and simple, tracing the life of Joe Dallesandro, who as a young man become an underground star, a potent symbol of the 60’s-inspired free love sexual revolution and an object of lust and icon of the emerging gay community.“In my movies, everyone’s in love with Joe Dallesandro,” noted the late Andy Warhol, who met Dallesandro at 17, and whose associate, Paul Morrissey, one of Warhol’s main collaborators at New York hangout known as The Factory, made young Joe a star of sorts in films like Lonesome Cowboys and Flesh. The documentary, directed by his stepdaughter, Nicole Haeusser, takes us back to the early 1970s, when Dallesandro was a streetwise youth with a sculpted body and an arrestingly beautiful face who unashamedly bared all for the camera.The tattoo he sports on his right shoulder — Little Joe — he did himself during a brief stint in reform school and earned him the lifelong moniker. His survival skills on the mean streets of New York earn him a special place in music history as Little Joe in Lou Reeds’ famous “Walk on the Wild Side,” a song that was exceedingly daring for its time. Through a series of interviews, Dallesandro weaves a fascinating tale of a life in which he is photographed by world-famous photographers like Richard Avedon, becomes an object of desire for Tennessee Williams, meets Sir Laurence Olivier and works with famed French director Louis Malle (in one his lesser known works.)

-The Globe & Mail
May 19 2010