"Stoned"

Is the Stones' Brian Jones, a temperamental rocker who met a tawdry end, the perfect subject for a biopic? Or is he a rotten one?

Editor's note: Warning: This review contains spoilers.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, The Rolling Stones, Reviews

Leo Gregory as Brian Jones

March 24, 2006 | We're used to thinking of rock stars who die young as tragic heroes, and in theory Brian Jones, who died under mysterious circumstances in his own swimming pool at age 27, ought to fit the bill. His story is definitely tragic, and he did found one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands in history.

But beyond that, there's not much that's heroic about Jones. Pictures and vintage footage -- the only way most of us have seen him -- show us a curious combination of heartthrob and troll: Beneath that flaxen bob, the hair of a mod angel, his features are beautiful from some vantage points, but there's always something blank and secretive about his eyes. In his wild little memoir of London in the '60s, one-time Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham describes seeing Jones for the first time onstage, in 1963: His "ugly pretty, shining blond Barnet was belied by a face that already looked as though it had a few unpaid bills with life. His head, having forgone a neck, slipped straight into a subliminally deformed Greystoke body."

That description might sound cruel if, at least from the admittedly comfy armchair of hindsight, it didn't seem so apt. And whatever Jones' gifts as a musician may have been, the bald truth is that nobody seemed to like him much as a person. When he died, his bandmates, friends and associates may have expressed the appropriate amount of grief, but many of them couldn't help adding an "it was bound to happen" shrug, as if they were relieved not to have to deal anymore with his selfish complexities.

Is Jones, a classic example of rock-star excess who met a tawdry end, the perfect subject for a biopic? Or, as a model of deep self-absorption, is he a lousy one? In "Stoned," Stephen Woolley's take on Jones' life and death, he's both. The movie opens with a vision -- let's call it a possible vision, since there were no witnesses to the scene -- of Jones' death. It's a glimmering summer evening at Jones' estate, Cotchford Farm, the charming property formerly owned by "Winnie the Pooh" author A.A. Milne. As Jones (played by young newcomer Leo Gregory) drifts, unconscious and alone, to the bottom of his pool, a statue of Christopher Robin looks on with sinister indifference: Perhaps not even Christopher Robin cares if Brian Jones dies or not.

From there, "Stoned" takes us backward and sideways in a series of flashbacks, touching lightly on Jones' youth in Cheltenham (and his aptitude for getting young girls pregnant and not giving a fig about it), his obsessive relationship with Anita Pallenberg (played here by Monet Mazur), whom he'd later lose to Keith Richards, and his flamboyant self-destructiveness. As he explains matter-of-factly to Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), the builder who's been hired by Stones tour manager Tom Keylock (David Morrissey) to do some work at the farm, "People think I'm a druggie, but I'm not anymore. I'm just a boozer."

"Stoned" fixates on the increasingly twisted, if somewhat symbiotic, relationship between Thorogood and Jones: Thorogood hires a crew of builders to help with the work and proceeds to complete it in earnest, unaware that the Stones' management, frustrated by Jones' mounting extravagance as well as his unreliability, is going to stonewall him when it comes to payment. Thorogood becomes Jones' baby sitter; he's expected to be on call at all hours, to make sure Jones' capriciousness doesn't get him into trouble. Jones returns the favor by humiliating Thorogood. In one scene, he invites the contractor to prove his manhood to Anna Wohlin (Tuva Novotny), the rock star's nubile young Swedish girlfriend, by doing numerous sets of push-ups. Anna teases Thorogood into a state of embarrassing tumescence, before announcing, in a flat Swedish accent, that she prefers brains to brawn. Jones looks on, a cruel satyr who's thrilled with his little joke.

The scene is both so appalling and so over-the-top absurd that you can't help laughing at it, and that's pretty much the effect of "Stoned" overall. There are sequences that are so ridiculously goofy you can't believe Woolley is actually attempting to pull them off with a straight face: In a scene where Pallenberg introduces Jones to the joys of acid, Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" -- what else? -- swells on the soundtrack. Jones loses himself in a hallucinogenic swirl, giving Woolley a convenient excuse for a decadence montage straight out of Kenneth Anger: Seminude, handcuffed blondes writhe in ecstasy as their tender flesh yields to the crack of a whip; an unidentified animal's throat is cut, presumably in a blood sacrifice to the gods of exploitation cinema.

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