Without You I'm Nothing (Go Ahead Bore Me … , Management Company Entertainment Group, New Line Cinema, MGM, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched two more Queer-themed films after Go Fish as part of Turner Classic Movies’ June 30 marathon, but the next one was a major disappointment. It was called Without You I’m Nothing and was filmed in 1990 as a screen adaptation of comedienne Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show premiered on Broadway in 1988. The full title of the stage show was Without You, I’m Nothing; With You, I’m Not Much Better, and I got the feeling that Bernhard and her director, John Boskovich (who also co-wrote both the stage version and the movie), might have been better off if they’d just stuck a camera in front of Bernhard doing the Broadway show than in trying to add movie-style “production values.” According to TCM host Dave Karger, the idea behind the movie was that Bernhard had begun cutting up and doing diva antics during the Broadway run of her show, and her fearsome dykey manager Ingrid Horn (Lu Leonard) felt she needed to be taken down a few pegs. So she booked Bernhard into an all-Black nightclub (though it’s played on screen by a solidly white venue, the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, near which Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. got shot and killed in June 1968 and also where I lost my virginity during a conference of student journalists in April 1973; I remember walking across the then-deserted stage of the Cocoanut Grove and recalling that that’s where Bing Crosby became a star with Gus Arnheim’s band in 1931) with a batch of disinterested Black patrons. But that’s not at all apparent in the actual movie. The audience ultimately leaves piecemeal during the show until by the time Bernhard finishes, there’s just one person left.

Bernhard’s show was mostly a stand-up comedy routine, but she periodically broke off to do songs, including her audacious opening number: Bernhard in blackface doing Nina Simone’s classic about racial and gender oppression, “Four Women.” Unfortunately, Bernhard left out one of the women (the second in Simone’s sequence, the mixed-race Sofronia, who was the product of a rich white man raping her mother), and she did the rest of the song surprisingly powerfully but was no match for Simone’s version. Sandra Bernhard became at least an “honorary Queer” by association with Madonna, who became her friend from 1987 to 1992. The two were widely rumored to have been lovers, though both denied it. More recently Bernhard has publicly identified as Bisexual and gave birth to a child, Cicely, in 1998 whom she’s raising with one of her female partners, Sara Switzer. I didn’t care for this film much, despite some genuinely creative and funny moments (including a welcome guest appearance by ex-X punk rocker John Doe, who duets with Bernhard on one of her songs), partly because Sandra Bernhard, or at least her stage persona, is one of those obnoxiously pushy Jewish “broad” types like Joan Rivers, Fran Lebowitz (who made a cameo appearance as herself in TCM’s next Queer-themed film, the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning), and others. She made some interesting song choices, including Hank Williams’s stunning lament “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (misidentified on imdb.com as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die”) and Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” which Bernhard first sings in a U.S. flag-based costume and then strip-teases to with Prince’s own record on the soundtrack. (One wonders how the producers got the notoriously prissy Prince, who was famous for not allowing anyone invited to his home to use swear words, to agree to let his record be used.) Ultimately Without You I’m Nothing was a real disappointment, especially after the quality and complexity of Go Fish, and though it’s nice that Sandra Bernhard is not only still alive but still active, her act remains at best an acquired taste for me.