The final film pulls away from the brightly colored insanity a bit but holds its own in surrealness. All That Jazz (1979), by and about Bob Fosse, is a movie that loves and critiques everything in the theater world. It follows Fosse-cypher Joe Gideon (played by Roy Scheider, never sexier) as he choreographs his upcoming musical, edits a film, and tries not to die. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen that shows realistic consequences to destructive behavior like amphetamine use and smoking, even if those consequences are portrayed in dreamlike musical numbers.

Much like the real person, the Fosse of All That Jazz is erratic and ingenious but also crippled by problems of his own making. This is not a cleaned-up, whitewashed view of the man’s life, and credit has to be given to Fosse for knowing what a pain in the ass he must have been to deal with either professionally or personally. The majority of the people around him are female, and there are lots of scenes involving them being rationally angry and tired of his crap. In fact, Fosse gets more of a pass from his male doctors, whose job it is to remind him that he’s killing himself slowly, than he does from some of the women in his life. The audience feels for anyone having to put up with him yet can’t help but be stunned at what he creates.

The final scene where Fosse waits for the heart attack that will kill him and confesses what a terrible person he was is sickly funny and quite glamorous. For those of us drawn to the world of theater and performing (warts and all), it encapsulates everything that field has to offer. Being told that what you are doing will kill you but continuing to do it because life is only worth it if you’re doing what you love is perfectly understandable, even if to do what you love, you need these things that will kill you. We can understand struggling to surpass your own achievements and then driving yourself crazy by never being as good as you think you can be, no matter what other people are telling you. The very last shot of the film is Gideon’s body being zipped up into a body bag. For some, it reads as tragic. For those of us who know the addiction to performance, it reads an inevitable.

While the popularity of musicals may ebb and flow over time, they never really go away. The safer ones get more attention and awards (although All That Jazz was nominated for and won several), but the real magic is in the weirdness. Weird musicals carry the concept all the way through to the end: none of this is real, all of this is staged, let’s go balls deep with it. People who dislike musicals like to make claims about how unrealistic they are while they stand in line for yet another superhero movie, but nobody who likes musicals is dying for realism. The point of musicals is to tell stories in a way that could never be replicated in real life so if that’s what we’re here for, why not take that idea as far as possible? Why not just surrender to mind blowing visuals, beautiful songs, and sheer lunacy? Weird musicals lean into this idea and will gladly take you along with them. But only if you let them.