JOAN JETT UNCHAINED

“You picked an interesting time to visit.” Michael J. Fox has his tongue planted firmly in cheek as he stands in the backyard of a small bar in Cleveland. The yard is paved with stones and covered with puddles, extras, equipment and four journalists, to whom Fox had addressed his remark.

It’s the last week of shooting for director/screenwriter Paul Schrader’s movie Light Of Day. Things are moving a bit slowly; tempers are still good-natured, but the surrounding cloud of tension grows more palpable each day. It’s not fun to pay union wages on weekends.

Without going into too many details, Light Of Day is a family drama concerning a brother and sister and their relationships with each other and their parents; the siblings are also in a bar band. (Once upon a time, Light Of Day was called Born In The U.S.A., but Bruce Springsteen liberated the title before the movie even began shooting; he contributed the current title song.) Fox plays the brother and the sister is played by rocker extraordinaire Joan Jett, in her major motion picture debut.