Without You I'm Nothing

There's nothing wrong with using inside jokes in a film — whether a fiction feature or a concert movie. After all, movies are replete with inside jokes these days, from veiled pop culture references to less subtle acknowledgments of celebrities.

But when an inside joke is the whole picture — or when a stream of such gags is intended to make members of the audience feel inadequate or uncultured or stupid for not getting them, they are likely to become rather off-putting.

Such is often the case with Sandra Bernhard's film version of her "fabulously successful one-woman show in New York," as she refers to her off-Broadway hit, "Without You I'm Nothing."

Bernhard is an acerbic satirist, well-known to the in, hip New York art-house crowd for her hard-edged put-down comedy. (Mainstream audiences may know her from appearances on David Letterman's late-night TV show or the Martin Scorsese film "The King of Comedy.")

There was a time when Bernhard's shtick was self-deflating. These days, however, she seems to be putting on — or putting down — everybody else. The show's title is the tipoff, and the attitude it suggests may chase away some potential audience members.

"Without You I'm Nothing" is vaguely set in a jazz nightclub where the black audience looks bored as Bernhard does her thing, beginning with fantasies about her Jewish background being supplanted with an Anglo white-bread heritage where her brother is named Chip and her mother tells her how proud she is of her, all set against a Christmas celebration.

Bernhard then segues into various deadpan routines, playing a number of broad roles, as "witnesses," a la Warren Beatty's "Reds," talk to the camera between sequences — a young actor discussing his best-friend's relationship with Bernhard and her personal manager discussing Bernhard's comedy background.

In addition, for little reason besides simple exploitation, there are also gratuitous sexual moments — a group of women in a public shower, with the camera panning in slow-motion past their torsos; Bernhard, in a fantasy scene, having sex with a black man; and in the finale, Bernhard coming out on the stage wrapped in an American flag, singing Prince's "Little Red Corvette" and then dropping the flag to do a writhing go-go dance wearing nothing but a G-string and pasties.

Bernhard is a very talented singer and comic actress, and she's at her best, and most universal, when poking holes in cliches about domestic Middle America or doing dead-on musical spoofs, whether whittling away at the banalities of Burt Bacharach songs or doing a wicked, hilarious impersonation of Diana Ross.