Julien Temple’s Documentary “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten”
Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir (subscription) was lucky enough to see Julien Temple’s new documentary about Joe Strummer called Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten at the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what he wrote:
If I wanted to set somebody afire with the potential of aesthetic and political revolution, though, I’d take them to see Julien Temple’s rich and exhilarating documentary “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten,” which premiered here on Saturday.
Temple’s film is much more than a biopic of the late Clash frontman, and still less a hagiography. Like the director’s outstanding Sex Pistols doc “The Filth and the Fury,” it’s a portrait of the peculiar convulsions of British society in the late 1970s and the exciting and often self-destructive pop culture it produced. “Joe Strummer” has all the energy, passion and high style of Temple’s many music videos, but the sheer complexity of the subject makes it his best film by a fair stretch.
Strummer came from an atypical background for a punk hero; he was middle-class, attended boarding school and had traveled all over the world. He was a hippie R&B musician before he was a punk, and was pushing 30 when he got his crack at stardom. He’d had lots of time to reflect on how not to become a cliché rock star — rich, famous, stoned and out of touch — so the fact that he did anyway is one of pop culture’s great cautionary tales.
Temple gathers Strummer’s friends, former friends and ex-bandmates around a series of outdoor campfires, which lends his interviews an intimate, ritualistic quality the subject himself would have appreciated. For a film that directly addresses aging, mortality, depression and betrayal, among other salubrious subjects, “Joe Strummer” is an incandescent experience. It celebrates Strummer’s fecundity and self-invention and honors his reticence and private despair, reminding us along the way what a contradictory and amazing affair a single human life is.
Sounds good doesn’t it? Recently someone implied that I listen to the music of Joe Strummer too much, or at least made it clear that they don’t share my enthusiasm for it. Let me preface this by saying that I wholeheartedly acknowledge that I have a personal flaw–I am completely inflexible in my view of Strummer’s genius. Another one of my personal flaws is the tendency to think badly about people who don’t share my opinions regarding what I consider to be visionary art and artists. I know its wrong, but there you go. At least I admit it. To point out that you don’t think Joe Strummer is anything short of spectacular to me (especially more than once) is to point out a potential deficiency in your own character. Its like someone telling me that Catch-22 isn’t one of the greatest American novels ever written. What kind of person would say that?
Similar Posts:
- “The Future Is Unwritten” and “Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer” Coming To A Theater and Store Near You
- “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten” Review
- Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, Nevada Museum of Art Film Series
Enjoy this post? Leave a comment below or subscribe to my feed. You also can sign up for email delivery by clicking here.
This movie sounds great. I’ll see anything about The Clash, but it’s about time Strummer got his own movie bio.
I’ve gotten to the point where I like his stuff with The Mescaleros even better than The Clash body of work. Sometimes I miss the short slash of Mick Jones’ guitar (honestly, what perfection–did he ever over play?) the direction Strummer started taking from the Walker soundtrack on is just amazing–roots rock, spanish, south african, and other international influences, and reggae of course just make it so varied and mature. Some of the songs are misses for sure, but man, I totally dig all three of The Mescaleros CDs.