Twyla Tharp has been choreographing dances for almost forty years, and by this time she should be a mature artist, yet she is not. If your subjects are aggression and apocalypse, how much can you mature? The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who made a career of cool doomed odysseys, antic and antisocial destructions, what did he end with? Eyes Wide Shut, a last film in which he saw and said nothing, despite the fact that it was based on a story by the Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, seer into souls. In a film about the subtleties of desire inside and outside of marriage, Kubrick came up empty. But then, when you do aggression-apocalypse you tend to get machismo-misogyny for free. Has Norman Mailer ever written a mature novel? Sam Shepard a mature play? In Kubrick women are dolly-girls or just not there; in Mailer they’re bimbos and bitches. This sounds a lot like Tharp. What begins as a dynamic fact of life—the might of masculine energy, its will to power—becomes the only high worth having, a groove on existential extremes. Why question the high? It’s simpler, more aesthetically liberating, not to.

Twyla Tharp has a new work on Broadway called Movin’ Out, a show about Vietnam set to old songs by Billy Joel. The cast consists of three men who are teenage buddies, the two women who are their girlfriends, and a chorus, or rather, corps de ballet, that fills the other roles. Like Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, the erotic update on Tchaikovsky’s ballet that stormed Broadway four years ago, there is no spoken language in Movin’ Out. Billy Joel’s rock ballads are organized to give us time and place, a musical panorama that spans the late sixties to the early eighties. It’s up to Tharp to tell the story in dancing and to make that dancing theater. What she comes up with is Deuce Coupe meets The Deer Hunter. Eddie and Brenda and Tony and Judy and James graduate from high school, the boys ship to Nam, the girls wait or wander, James dies, Judy cries, the boys return wrecks, everybody finds closure—all this in Tharp’s signature style: phallocentric, hyperactive, hostile.

If you were to divide Tharp’s art into periods, change would be loaded at the front. You’d have (1) Angry Young Woman —the severe and monotonal dances Tharp did with women very early on; (2) Androgyny—men are admitted into the company and in the process gender boundaries, all boundaries, blur and Tharp’s slippery style is born; (3) Angry Young Man—in 1973 Tharp choreographs Deuce Coupe to Beach Boys music for the Joffrey Ballet and discovers her inner teenage boy.

There was always an element of mockery to Tharp. Wearing a mop-top Beatles haircut, she built her dance style on a whole array of tuned-out teenage antagonisms—moves that looked like adolescent fidgets, twitches, and sneers, “so what” shrugs, and “I dunno” double takes. When Tharp danced solos, it was often as if she were wearing an invisible set of headphones, or was just ignoring the music, dancing to her own zoned-out drummer. She stuck wiggles and squiggles on steps—a kind of coloring outside the lines—and loved to suddenly spaz in double- or triple-time, a musical impertinence that signaled her impatience with the status quo. And she choreographed in a bumptious stream of consciousness—a little Abbott and Costello, a little late Joyce, a fine line between hyperarticulate and just plain hyper.

Within the context of classical dance, Tharp’s tactics and antagonisms cut deeper. Audiences took them in good humor, the way one accepts snotty cracks from stand-up comics. Tharp was turned on by arrogant energy, performance in extremis, and when, in 1976, at American Ballet Theatre, she got to draft off Mikhail Baryshnikov in Push Comes To Shove, she never looked back. Balanchine’s “ballet is woman” be damned. Tharp was one of the boys, and her dances revolved around guy after guy—Baryshnikov then Kevin O’Day then Julio Bocca then Angel Corella then John Selya. She worked boxing, aerobics, break-dancing into her ballets, and in Men’s Piece (1992) summed it up in a cri de coeur: “Who wanted to be a girl, anyway?”

Tharp has always had big ambitions, though I’m not sure when she got the idea she could tell a story. Abstraction is her sandbox, the arena of her Charles Atlas kick fests. Indeed, her most self-consciously classical ballets (usually set to stern old masters, very contrapuntal), with their swimmy symmetries and stuck-there posture, sometimes look like sand castles when the tide’s come in, shape dissolving right before your eyes. Tharp likes to fight the elements, fight the music, fight the world. She’s always been better as an “action” choreographer, sliding, flinging, slapping, dripping, driving dancers across the stage solo, in twos, in groups. She gives in to lulls and lyric idylls only to raise the sword once more—a dynamic we see endlessly in her duets, Apache dances in which couples exhaust themselves in domestic battle, only to recharge and battle again. But a story? When Tharp did a narrative ballet for ABT called Everlast, the plot was puerile—something about a boxer and an ingenue—and the expense of the production nearly broke the company (when Tharp wants money she has a way of getting it).

The overture to Movin’ Out is the song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” which could be words from Tharp’s mouth. And if we miss the reference to that first hit, Deuce Coupe, a dusty red convertible wheels onstage to remind us (it’s totemic, like the obelisk in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). The characters announce themselves like dancers in “Hullabaloo”—Mousketeers all grown up and doin’ the frug. As Eddie, John Selya in jeans greets us with a spate of delighted pelvic thrusts; Elizabeth Parkinson’s Brenda shimmies onto the stage as if out of a go-go cage. Keith Roberts’s Tony is Italian beef, Benjamin G. Bowman’s James a modest John Boy (of course he dies), and Ashley Tuttle as Judy is his gumdrop of a girlfriend, pink and a little sticky. The band inhabits a high-tech catwalk above the action, blasting out Billy Joel oldies-but-goodies that are sung in a Joel-esque voice by Michael Cavanaugh.

In the program, Tharp credits her son Jesse Huot “for having the idea for this show in the first place,” and one can see that on paper it probably looked like a good idea, a return to her roots. She’d choreographed the movie Hair in 1978, she collaborated with David Byrne on The Catherine Wheel in 1981, and come on, Mom, look how well this retro stuff does on Broadway—Grease, Mamma Mia, Hairspray—if anyone should be cashing in, you should. And why shouldn’t Tharp marshal her forces and have a hit?

The problem is, when it comes to constructing characters she hasn’t any forces to marshal. In one little dream ballet, Agnes de Mille could give us character on the couch, the vanities and fears, the catch of longing, the glint of a second, third, thought. Jerome Robbins could do it too, only glossier, snazzier. Tharp has never been able to do this. It’s too small, too still, too close, too warm, too woman. It’s just not her macho m.o. And while those choreographers worked in other vernaculars, Tharp does not. One cannot imagine her dropping her tics and schticks to make dances for Tuptim. She has one vernacular: Tharp. Take it or leave it. So Eddie and Tony and James get a lot of whipping turns and judo leaps, and also that vaudeville-patter-camaraderie that Tharp trots out in the same cheapo way Woody Allen, when he needs a laugh or an answer, trots out clips of The Marx Brothers. As for Brenda and Judy, the beauty and the goody-good, they’re so stock you could blow the dust off them. In almost forty years, Tharp still hasn’t learned how to show us a female face.

If the characters are cardboard, then stagecraft could make the difference—all those decades in the theater should count for something. But in the few moments when a choreographic vision kicks in, Movin’ Out doesn’t look like Tharp at all, it looks like Paul Taylor, whose company Tharp danced in before she set out on her own. Sunset, Company B, one feels both of these Taylor masterpieces—evocations of war and what it does to love—sitting on Tharp’s shoulders. In fact, the use of men in silhouette in a dance of mourning, or the way the corps is used in frieze patterns (very unTharp) to fill the stage and give battle action ballast, these moments look lifted. It isn’t pretty, Tharp taking from Taylor this late in the day. Then again, Taylor would have chosen only five or six songs, would have concentrated in 25 minutes what Tharp has forced into and strung out for 120. He would not have betrayed songs by making them move in narrative directions they don’t want to go or carry heavier emotional baggage then they can bear, as Tharp does with “She’s Got A Way” and “Pressure.” And he wouldn’t have asked Ashley Tuttle to fake cry like a bad soap opera actress. He would have given her dignity in loss. In a dance.

Movin’ Out is as dated as an old yearbook, and as square—which is amazing from Tharp, the eternal tough. In the first section, with high school over and before the boys are drafted, it’s American Graffiti does “American Bandstand.” In the war scenes, Full Metal Jacket morphs into Miss Saigon. When dead soldiers rise to do a ghost dance (a shameless gimmick), it’s The Night of the Living Dead meets “Thriller.” How faux is this show? When one of the songs ends with James blown away, bloody, twitching on the floor in a full-body death rattle, the audience applauds, because it’s the end of the song and because it’s such virtuoso twitching. The crowd’s hip to Tharp. Movin’ Out is like MTV. You watch it with eyes wide shut.