Though it won the Best Dramatic Film award at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, and despite a most compelling story, "Chameleon Street" is one of those independent films that may simply be too darned independent. The story is rambling, the technical quality is very low and some of the acting is virtually non-existent.
Still, there's that story, a real-life adventure that is as irresistible as it is intriguing, yet so implausible it sounds like a yarn being spun by a whimsical storyteller.
The film is played largely for dark comic effect, opening with Douglas Street (played by Wendell B. Harris, who also wrote and directed the film), who is barely a high-school graduate, working for his father's Detroit burlar-alarm company. But Street possesses a highly active imagination that is being stifled.
Meanwhile, his materialistic wife (Angela Leslie) is constantly pushing him to make more money to supply her mall habit.
So, Street and some friends decide to extort $50,000 from a Detroit Tigers baseball player, but they bungle the scheme and promptly land in jail. The notoriety that follows, however, changes him.
When he gets out, Street decides to impersonate professionals in an effort to get ahead - but more because he begins to enjoy the thrill of possible exposure. He becomes a Time magazine reporter and then a Harvard medical school graduate in a Detroit hospital. After landing in prison again, he escapes and heads for Yale, passing himself off as a French foreign-exchange student.
Later he takes on the persona of a civil-rights attorney (tricking, among others, Mayor Coleman Young, who plays himself here) and plans to enter politics.
The film's biggest irony is that Street gets away with living so close to the edge only to trip himself up with simplistic errors - as when he, as the Time reporter, puts on paper that he is a "wrighter."
Harris also attempts to provide an edge to the material in the way this black man fakes his way into success in white America.
The film resembles a cross between the 1960 film "The Great Imposter," wherein Tony Curtis played another real-life character (Ferdinand Demara) who passed himself off as professionals, and Woody Allen's "Zelig," in which the title character became like those who surrounded him at any given moment.
Harris has a commanding screen presence and a great voice, but he's too often smug and condescending, making no bones about how Street views the people who accept his fakery. In addition, his dialogue often seems stilted, the harrowing comic possibilities are largely unexplored and the film as a whole occasionally becomes tedious and even annoying.
Still, there are some terrific moments, which may be enough to get you past the many rough spots if you are hooked by the story.
Though unrated, "Chameleon Street" would doubtless get an R for violence, profanity, sex and drugs.