Paul Thomas Anderson’s modern masterpiece Boogie Nights is brimming with incredible needle drops. From the opening scene’s “Best of My Love” and New Year’s Eve’s “Do Your Thing,” to the climactic con’s “Sister Christian” and the ending’s “God Only Knows,” there are more musical hits than not-safe-for-work activity, which is saying a lot about a film centered on the adult film industry.
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Released in 1997, the film is set in the late ’70s when adult entertainment was enjoying a bit of a golden age. And, sure, it’s easy to chalk it up to lowbrow smut, but actually, the auteur’s touchstone is a character-driven story about a group of misfit toys searching for love and acceptance. It just so happens that their “found family” dwells in the porn industry.
Starring Mark Wahlberg as rising star Dirk Diggler, the cast also includes Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, and Julianne Moore. Moore plays Amber Waves (screen name), a stalwart and matriarch type in the biz whose subplot involves a struggle with addiction and a failed custody battle. The reason we digress here is because Amber’s drama is given the spotlight in one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll movie moments, according to Rolling Stone.
Midway through the film, Andrew Gold’s “Lonely Boy” underscores a hazy pool sequence in which Guzman’s character answers a phone call then wanders the party in search of a “Maggie.” Cut to Moore’s Amber, who has just attacked a pile of powder. The song, with its upbeat melody, is a brilliant choice to contrast the tragedy unfolding, and the Oedipal dynamic forming between Dirk and Amber.
“One of the most unbelievably sad moments ever captured on film, as P.T. Anderson takes a harmless bit of Seventies soft-rock fluff and turns it into a heartbreaking requiem for basically everybody in the movie, if not America in general,” RS writes. “You realize how completely doomed all these party people are, and how savagely they are going to break the hearts of everybody they ever touch. Oh, what a lonely boy.”
Released in March 1977 in the U.S., the song was included on Gold’s second studio album, What’s Wrong With This Picture? In an interview, per American Songwriter, Gold shared that the song took him only about four hours to write: “It was gonna be a real long song, because back then that’s what people were doing a lot. They would cut it down for radio. But I got bored after the third verse.”
The short and long of it is this: The single was a hit. Peaking at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, the pop-rock classic saw a revival when Boogie Nights reached the big screen, with the film’s soundtrack cracking into the Billboard 200 and landing on best-of lists all over the interwebs. Not bad for an old “boring” song about a lonely boy.
Related: 1963 Timeless Anthem That Opens a Legendary Film Ranked Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Movie Moment