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The title of Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), director Susan Seidelman’s second feature, comes from a declaration regularly placed in the personals section of a New York City newspaper by an anonymous man. It’s the way one young guy in the city essentially bat-signals for his mercurial girlfriend to return to his arms. The movie’s protagonist, a pretty, bored housewife named Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), awaits the recurring ads anxiously and finds them romantic — even worth projecting fantasy onto in a romantic life devoid of anything resembling excitement. Her rather piggish husband, played by Mark Blum, owns a hot-tub business in New Jersey, is having what he calls a “respectable” affair on the sly, and is so far removed from seeing his wife’s humanity in their few years of marriage that a climactic interaction between the pair has her asking him to see her — actually see her — with him hardly getting what she means. 

For a thrill, Roberta decides early on in Desperately Seeking Susan to see if she can catch the latest interaction between the eponymous character (Madonna) and the patient boyfriend (Robert Joy) who would rather she stop what we learn is a bad habit of getting whisked away by chronically bad decision-making. (Susan gets by by using and seducing people; we first meet her in the bedroom of a fast-asleep mobster from whom she’ll steal some money and presumably to-be-pawned tchotchkes.) Unbeknownst to Roberta, there couldn’t be a worse time for her to indulge her inner stalker. Soon after Susan leaves the mobster, he’s thrown out of a window for reasons that involve the tchotchkes, which are actually priceless Egyptian artifacts. A bad guy with sinisterly blonde hair (Will Patton, who in the 1980s was dependably sinister and blonde in movies) will stop at nothing to get them.

A mix-up leads him to think that Roberta is actually the woman she had been following around for a while. In a botched scuffle, Roberta hits her head on a pole hard enough to scramble her memory. She spends almost all of the rest of the movie thinking she’s the woman she had briefly admired from afar, improvising her way through a life in New York City largely through the assistance of a friend of Susan’s boyfriend (Aidan Quinn) who happened to be there at the right time. Most of Desperately Seeking Susan is devoted to Roberta trying to jog her memory and avoiding the wrath of Patton’s quiet, deadly villain. It requires a lot of acting from Arquette where she gets to play less of a character than a person in a tiresomely perpetual state of confusion. (The performance mostly consists of narrowed eyes and a mouth slightly agape.) 

Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan.

What we want to see more of, and get less of, is the Madonna character doing what she does best: making trouble (e.g., shoplifting, dining and dashing) while looking cool. Her line deliveries can sometimes be stilted, but that doesn’t really undercut what’s immediately a magnetic performance. Seidelman is wisely more inclined to have the 27-year-old roam around the city in striking fashions — her defining piece, which she’ll disappointingly sell to a thrift-shop owner, is a forest green jacket emblazoned on the back with a pyramid whose center is taken up with an eye — with her lips popping with thickly smeared red lipstick and her eyes coated with dark blue mascara. The character’s insouciance in the face of a rather stressful existence has a kind of bullseye in the wad of gum she’s usually inelegantly chewing. There seems to be little interest from Seidelman in making Susan strike us as too much of a character. This is a movie that invites you to think of Madonna as playing herself. It wants you to be enthralled by her rebel-girl charisma the same way Roberta is. 

The narrative stays busy with mistaken identity-related comedy. It gathers some charming performances: Quinn as a dreamy-eyed but exasperated savior figure, Laurie Metcalf as the sibling of Roberta’s husband who is so genuinely concerned with her sister-in-law’s happiness (they’ve become fast friends) that she doesn’t hesitate before broaching the subject to her brother of whether Roberta is sufficiently orgasming in bed. Everything is more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. Seidelman is better at capturing a setting (New York and the smelly streets upper-crust Roberta will have to figure out with doe eyes) and the ebullience of a performer than screenwriter Leora Barish is at writing jokes or situations that don’t feel like rehashes of done-better-before screwball-comedy antics. 

Desperately Seeking Susan’s most straightforward pleasure is the chance to see Madonna at an early peak. She was fresh from two albums that would establish her as a beacon of musical fun, and that helped her become a totem of outspokenness and stylishness that was aspirational to those it didn’t turn off. Little did anyone know of the incoming reinvention that would be the first of many for Madonna. She’d slim down her tanned Rubenesque frame into a pale gamine’s, straighten out her tangle-haired downtown-girl image into primmer old Hollywood-nodding aesthetics, and focus more precisely on how to up the echelon on her already-astronomical fame. Legions would continue to be their own variations of Roberta, dutifully following the cult of personality wherever she might go next.