Grossly Entertaining: Restored ‘Multiple Maniacs’ Finds Waters Gone Wild

Multiple Maniacs may be the Sibyl of filmmaking, a cultural and artistic split personality (OK, dissociative personality disorder). The restored early John Waters film (thanks Criterion!), opens today at the IFC Center. The comedy revels in the pure act of creation like those innocents Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland producing a play in the barn. But there's nothing naive about the subject matter: an LSD vision-quest that captures, in the 1970 of Hippies ascendant and straights in peril, a country's collective nervous breakdown. Then, as now, America was a nation at a tipping point, wedged uncomfortably like twisted knickers between Richard Nixon and Charles Manson. Waters and his band of merry filmmakers — gay, straight, bisexual and un-categorizable — stand atop the seesaw and jump. The film plays raw, repulsive, ribald – and shockingly prescient.