It’s 1995 and you’re beat for the Gods wearing your best 1979 vintage, DESIGNER, diva. It’s 1995 and New York is your entire world, the Twin Towers still stand tall, Times Square is still dangerous, cash is king and crime is high. It’s 1995 and tonight is all about you because you’re Parker Posey, dammit, this is your world and we’re all just living in it. Parker Posey is the Queen of Indies, always seemingly playing herself, with a dead-eyed charm, a sophisticated and chaotic kinetic energy, ready with a monotone put-down. In Party Girl, Daisy Von Scherler Mayer’s 1995 downtown fairytale, she’s Mary, Maid Marion of the club kids, a maximalist and messy free spirit in the Hot Trainwreck Hall of Fame (alongside Eve Babitz, Cat Marnell, Fleabag, Edie Sedgwick etc). 

She was the hot alpha bitch in Dazed and Confused, encouraging hazing with “fry freshman piggies fry!” (a line which both terrified and aroused me as a teen). Now in The White Lotus, she’s the hot alpha bitch in mid life, shapeshifted into the benzo-addled trophy wife so rich she doesn’t even know which country she’s vacationing in.“You can’t move here to Taiwan!” she says, in Thailand.  

Party Girl’s Mary has the shiny brown hair and complexion of the Girl Next Door except she dresses and acts like the Girl Next Door Who Ran Away And Joined an Acid Sex Cult. Her clothes—lashings of leopard and cheetah print, tights and stockings in an array of ecstasy-pill colours, bloodcurdling red, sickly acid purple—little black cunty glasses—are her battle armour. They’re a loud and proud rejection of the heroin-chic grunge that was going around at the time, with its muted palettes of moody blacks, greys and browns.

The only things she’s good at are “partying, flirting, making stuff up…”. She lives in a loft with her DJ friend Leo (Guillermo Díaz) decked out with sparse furnishings (a bed in the corner and one rack of Kenzo and Gaultier and Versace).  She’s “plucky and resilient” and has “wacky charm”. If Von Scherler Mayer wonderfully crafts a world from the perspective of an insider, it’s because she was that party girl, growing up in 80s New York as the daughter of famous actors, and she mined these experiences and more for the film. “ the way we wrote it was like a friggin’ documentary. We did so many interviews. We would interview DJs and we interviewed a librarian, and so much of the dialogue came from them”.

Von Scherler Mayer’s debut film put together a cast of indie darlings to create a film that was light on subject matter, but heavy on parties. Mary’s (Parker Posey) only real job is throwing parties and looking divine. She’s the Gen X Holly Golightly or Edie Sedgewick, voguing her nights away until she’s busted by the cops for hosting an underground rave at her cavernous apartment. She calls her godmother Judy (Sasha Von Scherler) her only family member left (both of her parents are dead). Judy bails her out and gets her a job at the public library. And hey presto, she learns how to be a functioning adult. Well, kind of. The film takes us on Mary’s journey from self-absorbed socialite to library science clerk, all the while dangling a will they/won’t they relationship with her falafel vendor, Mustafa (Omar Townsend), throwing in some unforgettable outfits and parties in between.

Mary is chaotic-good, or neutral-evil: you root for her, even when she bosses her friends around, or forgets dates, because she’s so charmingly weird, so removed from real life it’s like she’s in space. The film is like a reverse fairytale: her own self-absorbed world and sense of fun is cracked wide open when she takes a job as the library clerk to pay her godmother back. “responsibility” and “hard work” life lessons arriving in the form of Mr Dewy Decimal and library science.

Party Girl premiered on the world wide web back in 1995, the first film to do so. It captured a time when New York was cleaning up its streets after a decade spent as the most dangerous place in the world.  “New York in the 1990s was off-kilter, unfiltered, and out of focus.” photographer musician Ali Smith once wrote. Dance clubs like Tunnel and the Roxy played vinyl, cigarette butts piled up in ashtrays at the bar, and entry prices were still affordable

 I logged on Reddit to ask what those who lived in NYC in the 90s thou of the film. Reddit user “Fuckblankstreet” told me, “NYC was 100x cooler in the 90s. Mostly cause it was pre-mono culture where a million people wearing the same thing all lined up at the same place cause they saw everyone else there on IG, only to have a new style and thing that you’ve gotta do next month. When you found a cool place, it was because you actually liked it and you probably did some work to find it and get yourself in there.”

The film also unwittingly eulogised an entire era: the Club Kids. Club Kids were a regular staple of NYC nightlife in the 80s and 90s: a group of young, eccentric and artistic misfits who became famous for their outlandish outfits and parties. One year after Party Girl’s release, Michael Alig, ringleader of the Club Kids, killed his friend and drug dealer Angel Menendez, a seismic event which snuffed out Club Kid culture once and for all. It was immortalised in the film Party Monster, starring none other than ringleader of the child stars, Macauley Culkin.

The film doesn’t fall into the trappings of other shows or films about young, hot, white, semi-socialite women, like Lena Dunham’s Brooklyn in Girls or the New York of Friends: it actually reflects the real diversity of the Big Apple. Mary falls for the pretty Mustafa (Omar Townsend), a falafel cart vendor, from Lebanon. Her roommate Leo is Latino. Her best friend (Anthony DeSando) is gay. In the club, people of different ethnicities dance together.

And, despite being made 30 years ago, the film still resonates with the universal trappings of early adulthood: the sparsely decorated apartment, the laser focus on fun, sucking at romance, fooling around with your roommate, hating your job, losing your job, feeling lost… and so on. Restored in 2023, Party Girl still captures the essence of what being young and confused in your twenties feels like. 

Nobody today can afford to pay rent. Everyone is moving back in with their parents. We are in the midst of a so-called second cold war. An asteroid set to collide with earth in 2032 is the least of our worries.  I have been sober for six months now: like Mary, the library is now my club. We’ve had hot girl summer, feral girl winter, rat girl autumn. I propose that there’s no time like today, in our year of 2025, for Party Girl Spring. 

It’s when you flirt with street vendors, buy Gaultier jackets instead of paying rent (or better yet, steal them), and get up to no good in public libraries. It’s embracing the chaos. But it’s not just that. It’s also when nothing in life—an eviction, a break up, losing your job—can ruin your whimsical fashion sense. It’s about resilience with a diva attitude. It’s life as a performance. It’s taking adderall when you don’t have a prescription, selling your whole wardrobe to pay the rent because you can always buy new clothes, and believing you will still get the job, and the boy, because you have an unshakable, almost-delusional sense of confidence that things will work out.

Party Girl is not a perfect film. But why shouldn’t we get to watch something a little fun, a little odd and a little silly in our depressing times?  The party has to end sometime for all of us, but we can still be a little bit more like Mary, carefree, chaotic and a card carrying grownup, even while dancing on a library desk.