Cry-Baby

Baltimore in 1954 is split in two: drapes and squares. Johnny Depp plays Wade Walker, called Cry-Baby because he can produce exactly one tear from one eye, and he falls for a rich square. For his second studio film after Hairspray, John Waters built the cast as a deliberate provocation: Traci Lords, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake and Amy Locane in the same picture. Casting Depp was strategic too. He had just become a teen idol on 21 Jump Street, and the film makes that image the joke. It opened in nearly 1,230 theatres, unheard of for a Waters film, and it did not work. Against a budget between 8 and 12 million dollars it took roughly 8.3 million. It became a cult film afterwards and was turned into a Broadway musical in 2008, which picked up four Tony nominations. Who it is for: anyone who loves Waters mixing kitsch with rebellion and is open to fifties musical parody. Who it is not for: viewers who want to take it seriously. Every scene is deliberately fake, and that is method rather than failure.