Beyond the Multiplex

Nov. 1, 2007 | Look, I'm the wrong person to bring any objectivity to Julien Temple's movie "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten." It partly concerns the pop culture of my own teenage years, always a treacherous zone for any critic (or any other human being). Furthermore, it's about a rock musician I once worshiped and then abandoned, and discovered again much later, who is now dead. So Temple's film will inevitably be viewed by people of roughly my age and with roughly my background as a kind of generational myth, which is likely to irritate the crap out of everyone else.

Still, insofar as I can drag myself back from raving fandom to some kind of detachment, I think "The Future Is Unwritten" -- which is Temple's preferred title; the distributors have added "Joe Strummer" over his objections -- is the most powerful documentary I've seen all year, and one of the two or three best films ever made about an artist or musician. It marks both the high point and something like the moral justification of Temple's career, which includes big-money music videos for the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Janet Jackson, Tom Petty and many other artists, as well as a pair of splendid documentaries about the Sex Pistols and the 1977-78 punk revolution ("The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" in 1980, and "The Filth and the Fury" in 2000).

Strummer, of course, was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of the Clash, the Pistols' biggest rivals on the London punk scene. As Temple explained when I met him at Sundance last winter, he met Strummer in 1976 when the band was formed, and shot black-and-white footage of their first recording session in a studio at his film school. (That session produced the single versions of "White Riot" and "I'm So Bored With the USA," among other Clash songs.) One of the first things we see in "The Future Is Unwritten," in fact, is the 23-year-old Strummer spitting the lyrics to "White Riot" into the mike, without the musical track attached. It's an electrifying moment, rock history in the making.

Although Temple's movie is indeed a history of how Strummer, his songwriting partner Mick Jones, and the rest of the Clash rose from being London punk avatars to international superstars -- and then fell into the gradual, bitter and ironic decay that goes along with that -- it's also something much more important. Always a master of discovering and manipulating footage from various sources, Temple has assembled an extraordinary archive of film and video that documents and illustrates various aspects of Strummer's life and career.

Temple has found home movies of the London squatter scene where Strummer, then known as Woody Mellor, first made his reputation, and early, grainy videotapes of Strummer's pre-Clash band, a hippie-ish R&B assemblage called the 101'ers (who had gotten pretty damn good before he abruptly broke them up and turned his back on his squatter pals to become a punk icon). To capture the decrepit and claustrophobic atmosphere of England in the years of Strummer's childhood -- he grew up as John Graham Mellor, the privileged kid of a British Foreign Office diplomat -- Temple borrows bits of a legendary BBC adaptation of George Orwell's "1984" (starring Peter Cushing) and the animated version of Orwell's "Animal Farm."

Several of the doodles and cartoons with which Strummer filled his notebooks are turned into charming little animations, demonstrating that this driven and almost monomaniacal character had a whimsical side. Even the central weakness of most documentaries concerned with recapturing the past, the inevitable talking-head reminiscences, are handled marvelously. Temple assembles many of Strummer's old friends and colleagues from various periods of his life around campfires in London, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, in tribute to the campfires Strummer himself hosted at British raves late in his career.

At first, it bugged me that Temple never identifies these interviewees on the screen. Sometimes it's obvious, as when a decrepit-looking Mick Jones cheerfully admits to being a massive pothead, or when Clash drummer Topper Headon, looking like an aging accountant in a dusty-pink pullover, discusses his lengthy heroin addiction and his ejection from the band. And you're probably going to recognize Bono and Johnny Depp and Martin Scorsese. But there are moments when you sit there wondering: Isn't that that British artist who saws pigs in half, whatever his name is? (Damien Hirst, and yes, it is.) Is that Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or just some schmo who resembles him? Is that really what Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols looks like today?

It's still a debatable decision, but I relaxed about it. I don't actually think Temple is challenging his viewers: Are you hip enough to identify some minor rock celebrity of years gone by? His idea is more that Strummer's hippie ex-girlfriends and 101'er bandmates have just as much to tell us as Jim Jarmusch and Courtney Love do, and in some cases more. There's a tremendous dignity and pathos in the spectacle of all these middle-aged survivors, many of them quite a bit worse for wear, gathered together to remember a maddening, prodigious and contradictory person they loved very much.

Joe Strummer yearned for fame, and in the process of seeking it left many of his oldest friends feeling betrayed. He made some of the most memorable and influential records in rock history, although his musical talent was modest, at best. He yearned to use his fame and his bully pulpit to spread a political and social message, modeling himself self-consciously after Woody Guthrie. While he succeeded in doing that, far beyond what many people recognized at the time, he also fell into virtually all the familiar traps of rock stardom -- and could only weep bitterly when he heard American troops blasting "Rock the Casbah" as they bombed Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991.

Temple's film is a passionate testament to his own conflicting emotions about Joe Strummer, and the ultimate evidence of that emotion lies in its powerful combination of cinematic craft and honesty. "The Future Is Unwritten" never shirks from the less attractive sides of Strummer's personality, nor from the petty hypocrisies and pseudo-Stalinist conformity of the punk revolution itself. It doesn't look away from aging and death, which have begun to loom pretty large for those of us who can actually remember the 1970s. It doesn't look away from the beautiful, ravaged faces of its interviewees, as they were and as they are.

I look at them and see fragments of myself, both as the middle-class dad I am now and as the 16-year-old kid in pursuit of something (I didn't know what, and I probably still don't) who once cut school on a California winter afternoon to go meet Joe Strummer in the import section of a record store, and have him scrawl his autograph across the sleeve to "White Man in Hammersmith Palais." Not many other people showed up at Tower Records that day, and as I told Temple, Strummer spent several minutes chatting kindly with me and my friends. "Of course he did," he smiled. "He needed you."

Maybe he did, but as Temple's wonderful movie reminded me, we needed him more. Whatever Joe Strummer's flaws as a man, a musician and a political thinker, he tried to use the machinery of pop culture against itself, tried to invent himself as a new kind of celebrity who could be both useful and human. I still don't know if it's possible, but it was a good idea.

Also this week, we've got a surprising and delightful film about the wannabe actors who perform as superheroes on Hollywood Boulevard and a pseudo-punk artifact of quite another kind, the 25th anniversary rerelease of Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Diva." I'm not reviewing the documentary "Darfur Now," but it's another laudable effort to rouse the slumbering American conscience about the gravity of that disaster. I tried to watch Ash Christian's ultra-indie high-school comedy "Fat Girls" and decided it just wasn't for me. It's done tremendously well with audiences at gay-oriented film festivals, though, and your results may vary.

Next page: "Two middle-class guys in the same room, at that time, was not a good thing"