The Sedona International Film Festival is proud to continue its premiere series with the one-night-only screenings of “The Wannabe”, featuring an all-star cast and executive produced by Academy Award-winner Martin Scorsese and Dean Devlin. The film will show Wednesday, Dec. 2 at 4 and 7 p.m. at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre.
“The Wannabe” boasts a stellar, award-winning ensemble cast, including Vincent Piazza, Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette, Michael Imperioli and Nick Sandow.
Obsessed with mob culture, and desperate to fit in, Thomas sets out to fix the 1992 trial of John Gotti. He believes if the plan is executed, it will put him at the center of all that he idolizes. The plot is foiled, setting off events worthy of mob lore.
The film opens in Gotham in the early ’90s in the midst of the John Gotti trial, with the city divided between those who want the Mafia boss prosecuted and those who worship at the altar of this hometown folk hero. Thomas (Piazza, “Boardwalk Empire”) strongly allies himself with the crime boss, posturing and parading around in oversize suits as he attends the trial, loudly applauding Gotti’s courtroom comebacks, and portraying his turncoat henchman Sammy the Bull as a rat in caricatures, which he slips onto cars parked around the courthouse.
Thomas isn’t the brightest bulb in the Gotti-admiring firmament, and his efforts to win the mob’s respect inevitably backfire. Indeed, it is Thomas’ childish ineptitude that first attracts Rose (Arquette) to the much younger man as she takes a last-ditch lunge at a love as maternal as it is all-out passionate.
“The Wannabe” intertwines real people and true events — past and present — with fantasy.
“The Wannabe is one film you don’t want to miss,” raves Gary Miller from The Examiner.
“Arquette is magnificent as the ferocious and emotionally volatile Rose,” says Elise Nakhnikian from Slant Magazine.