While excerpts from the diary provide the narration for Bense's film, it would be a mistake to consider the document itself as more than a convenient MacGuffin for Bense's exploration. As the filmmaker embarks on his search for John, it becomes clear that his primary concern is not the elusive diarist. Instead, the filmmaker shares John's muse, the New York City of the 70's to the early 90's, before the Clinton boom and the reign of Rudy Giuliani hailed years of spiraling gentrification. Through his interviews with the many characters who figure in the diary, Bense pieces together a portrait, not of John, whom many have a hard time remembering, but of the underworld he inhabited, the Times Square Hotel, a one-time revolving door of hustlers, drug dealers, and the occasional lost genius.

Our first encounter is with Connie, a burnt-out ex-hippie whose hazy memories introduce us to the bizarrely foreign universe of New York City's dangerous past. This is the New York City described in a recent essay by James Wolcott as a place where "...the tourists looked scared. Getting back to the hotel alive was one of the main items on their checklists." In the case of the Times Square Hotel, we learn, quite a few didn't manage to make that check.

The most voluble member of John's former entourage, and the most interesting, is Sammy, a proudly Italian-American photographer who crowned a storied career documenting Manhattan's war zones by bearing witness to more harrowing ravages in Lebanon. A walking memoir, Sammy is the most forceful example of the film's general strategy: Its characters serve as metaphors for the city they inhabit. Almost every faded reminiscence, boozy rant and recollected twist of fate is paired with images of the city itself, of the forgotten histories that these people incarnate.

In these sequences, Bense's artistry gets heavy-handed. One particularly overbearing montage draws on a stock special effect to transform Manhattan's pedestrians into a routed army of translucent phantoms. It's a clichéd trick, and there was no need for Bense to burrow into that particular Final Cut menu to drive home his point.

There are other places in his one hour production where it feels like Bense is manipulating us, purposely rejiggering the chronology of his encounters to embellish the mystery surrounding the diary and its author. Yet the honesty of his subjects, and the brutality of the world they depict, is enough to make us set aside such quibbles and be captivated by their tales.

Review by Matthew Grinshpun.