“You can believe she’s my sister, or you can walk home.”

I had seen Star 80 before, but not for years, and I remembered it as quite good, but popping it in this time, I expected a pretty kitschy 108 minutes — it stars Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts, so surely it isn’t as affecting as I recalled, right?

Actually, it is — and it’s because of those two actors, not in spite of them. Hemingway and Roberts have become the punchlines, to differing degrees, of jokes about bad acting and B movies, and Roberts in particular has made horrendous script choices, and turned in performances so hammy that what looks like makeup or unfortunate plastic surgery is in fact a thick glaze of honey and brown sugar.

But you can’t accuse him of lacking enthusiasm, God knows; the same sleazy, ‘roidish intensity that often seems turned up too high, or like it belongs in another, better movie (see: The Ambulance, a movie whose script was apparently assembled from shredded stereo instructions), is pitch-perfect here. Roberts’s Paul Snider is exactly right, savvy enough to get over with an unworldly teenager like Dorothy Stratten but way too crude in his hustle for L.A. Snider’s debut at the Playboy Mansion is flawlessly uncomfortable (not least his interaction with Stuart Damon, a.k.a. “Alan Quartermaine,” whose “you, sir, are a horse’s ass” reactions are hilarious), and throughout the movie, Snider just doesn’t get it…and because we know where that not-getting-it is going to lead, Roberts’s portrayal has a hint of the sinister, but only a hint. Mostly, it’s the sort of too-obvious grasping that you can afford to pity, or roll your eyes at, unless you have to go home with it, and Dorothy’s realization that Snider can’t follow her into the charmed circle, and why, is expertly done by Hemingway.

She’s equally perfect for the Dorothy role. Hemingway’s range really isn’t much, but what she did do well, she did very well: the unsophisticated but bright, pretty girl, decent, easy to fluster, a girl just about to figure out who she is and what she doesn’t want. The performance is familiar — she gave similar ones in Manhattan and Personal Best — but nobody did it better, the girl finishing growing into the woman’s body. (She may have taken it a bit literally here, though; evidently she got breast implants for the role.) Once Hemingway got older, she couldn’t really pull that off anymore, and the same ungainliness that made her familiar and appealing, a girl you might know, started to register as disingenuous, then as tin-eared line readings.

But here, everyone’s at the top of their game — even Roger “Mr. Racine!” Rees as the Bogdanovich equivalent — and although the framing device can feel tired, visually and structurally the story is tight. The end of said story is familiar enough to us that it’s important to pace it unsparingly and not try to create false suspense; Fosse smartly begins with the chronological ending so as to neuter that problem. It’s an interesting time capsule, too, not just the cars and Paul’s makeover but the malaise that that time sometimes struggled under.

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