Movies and music have been aligned, even since the silent era. Though you couldn’t hear the dialogue, you could usually hear a musical accompaniment, from a full symphony down to a lowly piano or organ. Music, it’s true, hath charms to sooth the savage movie buff. Some great composers have created music for movies, and obsessive film fans collect their scores, from Bernard Herrmann to John Williams. Popular singers from mid-century were quickly absorbed into movieworld and often proved to be adepts at screen acting, which is all too often simply the skill of seduction that singers bring to a great song.

But when we get to rock and roll, things turn hinky. Rock is about hedonism, selfishness, private worlds, even anarchy, and these states run counter to the way movies get done in a highly structured and expensive system. And there are very few movies that either capture the flavor of rock or highlight the music itself in a way that captures the spirit of the music or the spine of the musicians.

John Kenneth Muir makes a good case in his recent book The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (Applause Books, 368 pages, $19.95, ISBN-13: 978 1 55783 693 9) that rock music and cinematic technology have “combined to create some of the greatest and most beloved movies of all time.” That is, until you begin to flip through its pages, which catalog most of the rock movies made in the last 50 years (though calling it an “encyclopedia” is a bit overkill for a narrow casting book of just a little over 300 pages; the 20 volumes of the Grove, an encyclopedia). How many are truly memorable, how many would you sit down and actually watch again, the way you’d listen to a Prokofiev symphony or watch a Hitchcock, Ford, or Coppola film? Damn few. Among the few I could come up with were A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, Tapeheads (not included in the book), Get Crazy, and The Ramones: End of the Century (also not included in the book). In the “encyclopedia,” brief celebratory accounts of the movies are interspersed with much more interesting essays about aspects of rock in film, such as rock star cameo, authority, the Yoko factor, and other interesting facets that occur when rock meets movies. In that regard it is a handy reference tool; as a critical guide, its approach is unblinkered enthusiasm amidst incompletion.

Three recent films drive home the real difficulties of marrying rock and film. Control is an account of the life and death of the Joy Division’s lead singer, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is the latest in a series of insta-documentaries about newly dead rockers, and I’m Not There is an unconventional biopic of Bob Dylan, the folk and rock singer-songwriter.

I know little if anything about neither Joy Division nor The Clash, and as far as I know have rarely even heard their songs. This makes me either the worst or the best judge of the clarity in Control. Ian Curtis was a young bureaucrat and married early, long before becoming a leader of the Manchester music scene. He also had a bit of problem with depression, and some suicidal tendencies, fully realized on May 18th, 1980 (coincidentally, the same day Mount St. Helens blew). His band, named after the sexual slavery area of a Nazi concentration camp, seems to have specialized in turgid ballads of adolescent angst. Once relatively famous, Curtis had an affair with a Belgian writer, and then on the brink of an American tour, hanged himself.

The film is made by Anton Corbijn, a photographer who had taken many snaps of Joy Division. Shot in black and white, the better perhaps to capture the gray oppressiveness of industrial England, Corbijn’s work is typical of the chronological rock biopic, blankly, almost neutrally stacking of scenes like letter blocks, but occasionally foretelling ominously the future, in this case repeated shots of the clothing rack which Curtis used (ironically in the film’s template) to off himself. What Control fails to make clear is why we should care about the private woes of a middling singer from 20 years ago. What lesson are we suppose to get out of this, aside from the invitation to bask ourselves in the adolescent depression that seemed to plague Curtis? As a tale of the rise and fall of a rock star, it is entirely conventional, and in fact, if the movie had starred Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak, say, instead of the contemporary rock star Sam Riley, it could just as easily have played in the 1950s as a showbiz story.

Early in Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, the star of the show is shown wearing earphones and singing into a microphone. We can’t hear the music, at first, only the voice, which is a tuneless blast of industrial noise, a ragged, shrieking howl which, it turns out, the kids liked way back in the mid-1970s. Embedded in surrounding music, the voice is slightly more tolerable, but the songs are not, repetitious barks from a factory horn. Despite the fact that Strummer was a poor musician and singer (at least when he was sober), and argumentative with his rotating bandmates (when he wasn’t seducing their girlfriends), there is a certain measure of sentimentality about the man, who died in 2002. Thus unlikely talking heads such as Bono, Matt Dillon, and John Cusack are marched out in Julien Temple’s doc to sing his praises and fuel themselves with some of the heat of his fame. He apparently had a radio show in his later years and his rambling “views” are smeared over the soundtrack, to the delight of many, no doubt. Rock stars, it turns out, need not form any coherent political statements; anger and sentimentality will suffice. Strummer’s views are encapsulated thus in the film: “People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks. I am one of them. But we’ve all gotta stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything. This is something I’m beginning to love. People are out there doing bad things to each other. It’s because they’re being de-humanized. It’s time to take the humanity back to the center of the ring, and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people, you’re nothing.” Much is made of Strummer’s “philosophy” of the bonfire as a communal occasion, but right now I can think of a better use for such conflagrations.

Todd Haynes’s Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is the most ambitious film of the three, but also the worst. It is almost impossible to believe that such amateurism came from a director of his stature. Haynes’s conceit is that Dylan is split up into different people (and actors)–an idea borrowed, like virtually every other trope in the film, from European cinema (in this case Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire). The six different people who “play” Dylan are either shards of his reputation, different ways he may have viewed himself, or different people he might have been or become if his career had gone differently. For example Heath Ledger plays Dylan as if he had become instead a philandering, married movie star (unlikely, given his looks and voice, as we now well know). He is also an African-American runaway child, a woman, a Britisher (the most underused), his basic self (though prettied up in the form of the rugged Christian Bale), and Billy the Kid, in the form of Richard Gere. Each segment quotes from Dylan songs, movies, album covers, and famous photographs, and is cast in the style of a famous directorial predecessor, such as Richard Lester in the British sequences or Antonioni in the actor sequence. In effect, the film isn’t all that far from Kevin Spacey’s disastrous biopic of Bobby Darin.

It’s all very modern and post-modern and structuralist and all that. But as Andrew Sarris wrote a long time ago, a great director has to first be at least a good director, and the incompetence evinced in this film is beyond belief. Note the clumsiness of the faux documentary scenes with Julianne Moore as “Alice,” or rather Joan Baez. Did Haynes want these moments to feel strained, false, unconvincing, and inept? The whole Billy the Kid sequence is a non sequitur. If it were a short film on its own legs it would be laughed off the screen as the failed excrescence of a beginner. Cate Blanchett is receiving a lot of praise for her account of the newly “electric” Dylan, but it is just a physical impersonation, and seemingly based on the ability to wear thin black suits. Vocally it is as appalling as any lampoon of the singer. A lot of Dylan’s songs are about the singer of the song having knowledge that is beyond the victim of his harangue (”Like a Rolling Stone,” “Ballad of a Thin Man”), and in its purposeful obscurantism Haynes’s film wholeheartedly embraces Dylan’s world view to the exclusion of viewer, who knows something is happening but they don’t know what it is.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.