The Last Days of Disco (1998)

The Last Days of Disco is a 1998 comedy-drama film written and directed by Whit Stillman and loosely based on his travels and experiences in various nightclubs in Manhattan, including Studio 54. The film concerns a group of Ivy League and Hampshire graduates falling in and out of love in the disco scene of New York City in the "very early 1980s". Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale have the lead roles.

The Last Days of Disco is the third film in what Stillman calls his "Doomed-Bourgeois-in-Love series", which begins with Metropolitan and continues with Barcelona. According to Stillman, the idea for The Last Days of Disco was originally conceived after the shooting of disco scenes in Barcelona. In 2000, Stillman published a novelization of the film, titled The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

The film was released theatrically in the United States on May 29, 1998, and its DVD and video releases followed in 1999. The DVD releases eventually went out of print and the film was widely unavailable for home video purchase until it was picked up by The Criterion Collection and released in a director-approved special edition on August 25, 2009. Along with Metropolitan and Barcelona, a print of The Last Days of Disco resides in the permanent film library of the Museum of Modern Art.

Synopsis

In the early 80s Alice Kinnon (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte Pingress (Kate Beckinsale), two young Hampshire College graduates. work in a New York publishing house as poorly paid readers. After work they are able to enter an exclusive disco nightclub where Alice is hoping to meet Jimmy Steinway (Mackenzie Astin), who works in advertising and uses the nightclub to entertain clients. Jimmy is ill-tempered because he has been barred from bringing clients to the nightclub and is eventually kicked out by his friend Des McGrath (Chris Eigeman), who works as a manager at the club but whose job is in jeopardy for allowing Jimmy and his clients inside.

Actors