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It was impossible to look away from INXS frontman Michael Hutchence when he was on stage. Dogs in Space (1986), the first of a few movies he appeared in, practically dares you to not be so drawn to him, and it turns out to not be so hard to oblige. In the film, set inside the Little Band milieu that flourished in late-1970s Melbourne, he plays Sam, the lead singer of a middling punk group for which the movie is named. Outside the few scenes where Hutchence performs live with this fake band pretending as if he’s only average at commanding a room, you nearly don’t notice him. The almost entirely plotless movie mostly takes place in a house where Sam, his stylish blond girlfriend Anna (Saskia Post), and several of their friends live. Scenes almost always unfold in the context of a party or a live performance, with few moments where Sam isn’t lost in the kind of drugged-out haze that makes so much as standing up straight seem like too taxing a proposition.

Richard Lowenstein, the writer-director who based Dogs in Space on his own experiences, dispenses with narrative and character development to a degree that would feel more maddening if its indifference to convention didn’t feel so productive. The movie would probably be more emotionally affecting with tidier narrative arcs and more lucidly drawn characters — if we didn’t feel, from the moment the movie starts, like we don’t belong here, that we’re only spying on the lives of others. (The fluid, long take-prone camerawork can make it feel like we’re watching everything through a phantom’s gaze.)

Lowenstein betrays admirable disinterest in flattering audience expectations if it means bastardizing ultimate aims to as faithfully as possible present on screen what it was like inside this short-lived world. You detect no sentimental retouching in this movie where monotony and boredom are far easier to come by than everyday thrills. Its characters are just trying to get by, their relentless, ultimately unsatisfying hedonism a reliable outlet in a life where the possibility always gnaws that it might not be viable in the long term making a living doing what you love. If you finish Dogs in Space wanting more, wishing the relationships felt bigger and that the musical passion ostensibly undergirding everything was more thoroughly engaged with, that’s probably a good thing. 

Dogs in Space reminds you how much the pegging of a person or an era as “important” can do damage. The chasm between what something actually was versus what nostalgia and fond remembrances can build it into only widens without sobering interruptions — like Dogs in Space does in feature-length form — that put into relief that sometimes a person or thing’s greatness is better appreciated from a far-later vantage point than in real time. The latter comes with the baggage of quotidian anxieties and uncertainty. The former is far more hospitable to flattering selectivity, egged on by cool remove and the privilege of being better able to put things into clarifying context. I don’t know how much I want to see Dogs in Space again. I also wish there were more movies like it.