The Nomi Song | Telescope Film
The Nomi Song

The Nomi Song

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  • Germany
  • 2004
  • · 98m

Director Andrew Horn
Cast Ann Magnuson, Joey Arias, Calvin Churchman, Gabriele Lafari, David McDermott, Page Wood
Genre Documentary, Music

Looks like an alien, sings like a diva - Klaus Nomi was one of the 1980s' most profoundly bizarre characters to emerge through rock music: a counter tenor who sang pop music like opera and brought opera to club audiences and made them like it. The Nomi Song is a film about fame, death, friendship, betrayal, opera, and the greatest New Wave rock star that never was!

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What are critics saying?

80

Variety

An absorbing homage to obscure but fascinating late '70s-early '80s German stage artiste Klaus Nomi.

80

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

Intriguing and affecting documentary.

80

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Crust

Horn, who knew Nomi, does an excellent job of evoking the exhilaratingly hedonistic period the film covers as well as the long shadow that the coming of AIDS casts over it.

80

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

Made with considerable wit and style, Horn's thoughtful celebration of the era and its most uncanny diva could function as the show's ("East Village USA") supplement.

70

Chicago Reader

Andrew Horn, writer of “East Side Story,” directs, stylishly.

70

The New York Times

An affectionate portrait, not only of Nomi, but also of the long-gone days when downtown Manhattan was an affordable enclave for creative misfits.

70

L.A. Weekly by Ernest Hardy

Dazzles with rare performance footage.

70

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Without coming out and saying it, The Nomi Song creates the sense that its subject might simply have been a few hundred years ahead of his time.

63

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

Occasionally exhilarating documentary.

60

TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh

And if you never learn much about the man behind the mask, well, that's as Nomi would have wanted it.