Life and Death on the A-List.

Woe is the soul who trudges though the shallow, sometimes-toxic waters of New York's gay scene in an attempt to make it into that exclusive club known as the A-list. Such is the message of Jay Corcoran's disturbing documentary Life and Death on the A-list, a chronicle of the sad, seemingly depthless existence of model and actor Tom McBride, who died of an AIDS-related brain disorder (progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy) in 1994.

According to McBride, the two requirements for making it onto the A-list are a "hard body" and professional "accomplishment. " McBride certainly had the bod going on, as is evident from Corcoran's annoyingly prurient and persistent focus on the model's physique. (Was it really necessary to shoot McBride as he was hopping into the bathtub to take a shower?) As for accomplishment, McBride's success as an actor and model was depressingly ephemeral Corcoran shows clips-none of them adequately explained-from some of McBride's stints in various commercials, soap operas, and TV movies (including a scene with Bette Davis), but we never get the sense that McBride was any more than just another pretty face shilling for laundry detergent. McBride himself asks the camera, "What happened to my career?" Neither he nor Corcoran bothers to offer the viewer any answers.

Perhaps the question McBride should have been asking himself in the last years of his life was, "What happened to my soul?" His inability to see beyond the superficial concerns of pumping up his body and fucking anything that walked is truly startling. It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to see that McBride's staggering narcissism was working overtime to make up for his wounded self-esteem.

Corcoran, an actor himself who has appeared in the plays Jerker and Party, certainly doesn't help his subject's case any by including interviews with friends who talk only about McBride's physical attributes. He's touchingly remembered as a "trophy," a "stud muffin," and a demigod of the gay world."

Lacking both irony and empathy, Corcoran's portrait of McBride is one-dimensional and, ultimately, mean-spirited, as if the filmmaker couldn't contain his considerable disdain for--and perhaps envy of--his subject. How else to explain the film's coda, wherein McBride uncharacteristically muses about the end of "this existence as we know it" and his abiding regret over "all those boys I didn't get. " Asks the director: "Are you serious? Answers McBride: "I haven't had enough. I'm not done. Who's done?"