TWILIGHT LOS ANGELES

1/2

Filmed one-woman stage show about the 1992 Los Angeles riots, with added news footage and interviews. Performed and written by Anna Deveare Smith. Directed by Mark Levin.Running time: 85 minutes. Not rated. At the Film Forum, Houston Street at Varick Street.

IT’S easy to see why Anna Deveare Smith received such rapturous praise for her one-woman shows about the Brooklyn and Los Angeles riots of the early ’90s.

The actress, writer and NYU professor is a simply an extraordinary mimic whose on-stage transformations from one personality to another are astonishingly effective.

When it was first performed in theaters a couple of years after the L.A. riots took place, “Twilight Los Angeles” must have been very powerful. Unfortunately, director Mark Levin’s filmed version lacks that impact.

Smith’s monologues are diluted by Levin’s inclusion of news footage of the Rodney King incident, the subsequent trials and the riots themselves, as well as interviews with the likes of L.A.’s disgraced former Police Chief Daryl Gates.

And Levin’s effort to maintain the “relevance” of the interview-based monologues, by following Smith on a tour of present day L.A., having cursory conversations with community activists about whether things have changed much in the ensuing eight years, has exactly the opposite effect.

On the other hand, even if it does overshadow Smith’s virtuosity as a performer, the carefully selected documentary footage does contain some moments which could change the way you perceive the riots and their causes. At the time, the so-called “uprising” was seen primarily as a furious and politicized response to the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King.

But then you see all those shots of laughing looters, and hear the racist rhetoric of people like Reginald Denny co-assailant Harvey “Keith” Watson, and community activist “Queen Malkah,” who explains to Smith that Koreans are “like roaches …”