Strummer Fought the Law and Won

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The New York Sun

As complex and stirring as its charismatic subject, Julien Temple’s documentary about the former Clash front man Joe Strummer is much more than a punk-rock postmortem. A serious pop-historical look at “the only band that matters,” as Columbia Records declared the group to be, is long overdue. But the rise and fall of the scrappy London quartet, which reinvented rock music on its own terms in the late 1970s, is only part of the story Mr. Temple tells.

When Strummer died on December 22, 2002, it was a huge shock. Only 50, the singer and guitarist had lived his life with a congenital heart condition, unaware all the while that he had it. His premature departure may have been very “rock star,” yet the beauty — both of his life and of Mr. Temple’s deeply affectionate chronicle — was in how Strummer so thoroughly renounced the concept.

By the time the Clash’s most commercial songs, such as “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and “Rock the Casbah,” became soundtracks for TV commercials in the 1990s, Strummer had begun to hit his stride anew. He was playing a mash-up of global music styles with his band, the Mescaleros, spinning his favorite records on a popular BBC World Service show called “London Calling” (after the Clash’s 1979 classic record), and organizing campfire gatherings that he called “Strummerville.” His re-emergence as a public artist, after a troubled spell in rock ‘n’ roll limbo, was gratifying to witness.

If the careers of most rock bands follow predictable paths from rags to riches to the slow — and madly profitable — death of the reunion circuit, Strummer chose a nobler, if vastly more difficult, road. Mr. Temple smartly keys in on Strummer as a questing idealist first and foremost, and traces the ways that his musical ambitions reflected a restless utopian zeal.

The son of a left-leaning British diplomat who was born in Ankara, Turkey, Strummer had already lived around the world when he landed in art college and then, soon after dropping out, the London hippie scene, sharing a squat and dropping his birth name — John Mellor — for a new moniker: “Woody.” The first instrument he played was a ukulele, but after he picked up the guitar in earnest, he changed his name again. Now he was Joe Strummer, singing for a conventional pub-rock band called the 101’ers. Then, one night in 1976, a band called the Sex Pistols opened the show for the 101’ers. Strummer was electrified. One month later, he was recruited by a fast-talking manager named Bernie Rhodes to join the Clash. And the rest is history.

Or so they say. Mr. Temple chooses a more interrogative approach. As he showed in his previous film, “The Filth and the Fury” (2000), a documentary about the Sex Pistols, the filmmaker has a clever touch with raw materials and multiple perspectives. His nonfiction films aim to subvert the expected, using formal innovations to keep things surprising. If “The Filth” was an expedition to the dark side of the English mass psyche, “Strummer” is more about one pilgrim’s progress. Rather than compile the usual talking-head interviews, Mr. Temple gathered an assortment of Strummer’s friends, family, lovers, and bandmates at various campfire settings overlooking London, Los Angeles, and Manhattan, conjuring what amounts to convivial wakes where his camera took in collective reminiscences. (Some of the more famous faces, such as Bono and Johnny Depp, in full pirate mode, enjoy private campfires — which is inadvertently hilarious).

These anecdotal accounts of Strummer’s life brim with a raw honesty that equates to tough love, and are usually backed up with Strummer’s own comments, edited from various interviews. Former bandmates, such as guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon, are likewise searing and direct. Nothing is glossed over.

Mr. Temple’s remarkable skills as a hunter-gatherer have turned up an astounding amount of resources, including a trove of Super-8 footage and Strummer’s apparently vast archive of cartoons and journals. These are deployed to give the film a dense, scrapbook feel. Yet the bulk of visual and aural information is so deftly edited that the pace rarely lags, only lapsing in a few instances of needless pop celebrity blather. The director uses a wonderful organizing scheme, letting Strummer’s playlist from his BBC radio show provide a thematic soundtrack that cues narrative leaps and buffers the anticipated bounty of concert video and home movies.

Fans, of course, will eat this up. The detailed segment on Strummer’s love affair with New York City, and the Clash’s furious 17-night stand at a Times Square club in 1981, packs a skin-prickling charge even now.

Even though he works hard at not creating a hagiography, Mr. Temple can’t help but imply that, in his 50 busy years, Strummer achieved a kind of saintliness beforehis peaceful death. But if that’s the case, both the movie and its hero earned it the hard way. This may be the most emotionally true rock documentary ever made.

“Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten” begins a limited run at IFC Center on Friday (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).


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