There was a brief time a couple decades or so ago when Vincent Gallo was an exciting creative voice. I was recently reminded of this when visiting the independent theater Cine Tonalá in Mexico City, which prominently displays a framed poster of his directorial debut Buffalo ’66 in the lobby. It’s still a beautiful object that conveys a kind of in-the-know, independent-cinema cool, and it was worth framing to preserve the layer eye-catching glitter in its title text (which reads more as television static in the 2D version I’m more familiar with). The young, mysterious Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo ’66 and Brown Bunny is long-dead, though, having since been replaced by a grimy right-wing demon who lashes out at anyone who dares to question his all-knowing, all-powerful genius. Audiences no longer have to wonder how Gallo channeled such a putrid, self-centered asshole of a character as the lead of his own 1998 debut. The remaining wonder of the film is that Gallo does seem to be fully, demonstrably aware of how unpleasant he is to be around. He starts Buffalo ’66 being released from jail into the winter snow, with no loved ones meeting him at the gate. Unable to impress his parents with a genuine girlfriend, he kidnaps a teenager at gunpoint and forces her to play house to make himself appear loveable. He then spends the rest of the film working up the courage to settle a one-sided vendetta with a single act of violence he doesn’t have the stomach for. He’s deeply, thoroughly uncool – a total loser.

Vincent Gallo put a lot of himself into the depressive loserdom Buffalo ’66, which is something he’d go on to brag about to the press. Every chance he gets, he takes sole credit for everything about the picture that earns positive critical feedback, downplaying all contributions from his creative collaborators. The teenage Christina Ricci gives an incredibly bratty, disaffected performance as Gallo’s kidnap victim, modeling a babydoll grunge dress & tap shoes combo that affords the movie most of its late-90s cool. According to Gallo, she was more of a “puppet” than an actor, with him operating her every move on camera as the omnipotent puppet master. Similarly, he’s taken sole credit for all the creative work in the screenplay, describing his credited co-writer Alison Bagnall as a glorified “typist.” He doesn’t just take credit away from women, though. He’s also claimed ownership of every creative choice in the cinematography, firing industry legend Dick Pope early in the production and replacing him with Lance Acord, whom Gallo describes as a hired “button pusher.” That by no means covers the full scope of “difficulties” Gallo had with his cast & crew (his public feud with a nearly-unrecognizable Anjelica Huston, playing his mother, is even more storied), but it does cover the three factors that make the movie stand out as remarkably great, each apparently attributable to Vincent Gallo’s singular genius in a world full of lifeless automatons that he has to manage in order to see his vision through. Poor guy.

The first time I saw Buffalo ’66, I was around the age & temperament of Christina Ricci’s character in the movie, by which I mean I was a gloomy teenage grump. She’s the only character who fully falls for Gallo’s bullshit, fawning over him as “the sweetest guy in the world, and the most handsome” while his more jaded & faded friends & family resent his lingering presence as if he were a pestering ghost. I was similarly smitten with Gallo’s artistic vision at that age, finding Buffalo ’66‘s unpredictable camera angles and segmented picture-in-picture frames to be an exciting new spin on the lone-wolf crime genre. Revisiting the film a couple decades later, the relentless, exhausting rhythm of Gallo’s dialogue fits right in with the general overwritten machismo of the post-Tarantino cokehead 90s, and you have to squint a little harder to pick up on its one-of-a-kind novelty. Undoubtedly, the movie still looks cool, approximating the same Polaroid-in-motion aesthetic achieved in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video. The dialogue purposefully undercuts that cool at every turn, though, with Gallo’s explosively violent reaction to every minor setback in his go-nowhere missions to impress his parents and settle an old football betting vendetta making him look like the squirmiest of little worms. When I was a teenager, I understood this to be a cool movie for cool people; now I understand it to be a slickly-produced character study of a terminally uncool dipshit.

As relentlessly gabby as Gallo’s antihero is in Buffalo ’66, his self-edited cut of the trailer features no dialogue or moving images. It’s just a series of stills conveying how cool the movie looks as a collection of working-class-fringe aesthetics while avoiding how grating of a personality Gallo himself plays at the center. It’s the same smartly observed marketing approached that inspired the glitter on the poster, promising a kind of indie-cinema glamour that willfully ignores the rotten core just beneath that layer of glimmer. At no point in the film does any of this petty-bully characterization feel at all unintentional. Gallo seems to know exactly how queasily pathetic he’s coming across on camera, which only makes it odder that he seems unaware of how that small-minded narcissism is coming across behind the camera. Maybe his dwindling opportunities to follow through on the promise of Buffalo ’66 & Brown Bunny have cleared that up over the years as he’s burned professional bridge after bridge (at one point even getting into vicious public feuds with his critics, most infamously Roger Ebert). I don’t know that letting him out of director’s jail would do any good at this point, though. His late-90s moment is long gone, and now he’s just a pestering indie-cinema ghost haunting vintage posters & Goodwill DVD shelves.

-Brandon Ledet