Know me now The Nomi Song could use more solos BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Nomi Song Directed by Andrew Horn. With Klaus Nomi, Ann Magnuson, Gabriele Lafari, David McDermott, Page Wood, Tony Frere, Man Parrish, and Alan Platt. A Palm Pictures release (98 minutes). At the Brattle Theatre March 4 through 10.

A turning point in the new-wave music movement of the late ’70s might have been when a surly punk crowd at a Manhattan club fell silent as Klaus Nomi sang the aria "Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix" from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delila. Although barely visible in a grainy video of the performance, he arrests the eye with his Saran Wrap cape and Renaissance collar, his white-painted face, triangular coif, and black, Betty Boop lips. Then that voice, an unearthly contralto stilling the cynical, savage breasts of the jaded hipsters in the audience.

Such snatches of Nomi singing — few, fragmented, and far between — in Andrew Horn’s fascinating but erratic documentary alone make it worth a look. Less compelling is The Nomi Song’s MTV Behind the Music–style profiling of the little people who helped Klaus on the way up and whom he forgot when he made it to the very brief big time.

They are indeed pretty forgettable. Nomi was a pastiche of vaudeville and classical, kitsch and avant-garde, Teutonic tenor and soaring, insane falsetto. He looked like an Art Deco cross between Joseph Goebbels and Le petit prince. He made a couple of albums that no one who heard them will ever forget and that are virtually impossible to obtain today, then died of AIDS in 1983.

What we’re left with are the surviving citizens of the "Nomi" universe: friends, assistants, hangers-on, and wanna-bes who wanted a share of his image and success but were betrayed or deluded. The talking heads consist of costume designers, stage managers, music directors, and others who argue that they packaged Nomi’s image and conceptualized his performances and made him what he was. The battered old videos make it hard to gauge; only Nomi’s uncanny presence comes through.

As a journalist who covered his meteoric career puts it, Nomi’s surface was profound. The added adornments of others seem only to cloud it. Period interviews with a rather ordinary-looking, out-of-costume Nomi and taped recollections from his straitlaced German aunt offer a glimpse below that surface but offer little insight into what might compel someone to resign from the human race and lay claim to extraterrestrial origins (Song coyly opens and closes with segments from the 1953 film It Came from Outer Space) and an apocalyptic destiny.

His biography is that of a million other dreamers. Born Klaus Sperber in Essen, he pursued a vision of becoming his own kind of diva, occupying a niche somewhere between Elvis Presley and Maria Callas. He studied in Berlin and moved to Manhattan’s East Village, where the Nomi persona flowered. Ann Magnuson remembers one of its earliest manifestations: Nomi perched on top of a foul mound of mired snow singing some translucent aria. Another friend recalls listening for hours to Nomi practicing, his voice echoing through a St. Mark’s Place courtyard. Partly as a gag, musician acquaintances arranged to put him on stage. Since Nomi’s appearance was so outlandish, they were at a loss as to how to costume themselves. After settling on ski masks, they realized it didn’t matter, since, as one remarks, nobody was looking at them.

What were they looking at? A postmodern Tiny Tim? David Bowie with more oddity and less space? A clip of Nomi as one of Bowie’s back-up singers in a 1979 Saturday Night Live appearance is both exhilarating and a little sad. It’s hard to say who’s influencing whom (I suspect Devo, Talking Heads, and Madonna might have taken clues from Klaus), but Nomi and his minions thought fame was around the corner after the show.

They never heard from Bowie again, however. Frustrated, Nomi dumped his crew, signed a deal with a French record company, and achieved — despite what his embittered ex-colleagues in Song say — his best work in the last couple of years of his life.

He was, they tell us, a lonely creature, cruising the Hudson River docks for company, his "profound surface" making any other contact inconceivable. "Will you know me . . . now?" go the lyrics of his signature "Nomi Song," which he sings with a Vienna Boy Choir sweetness near the end of the film. A rhetorical question, no doubt. Abandoned by all on his death bed, he returns to haunt and delight, in however halting a form, in Horn’s film.