‘The Doors’ Film Still ‘Breaks On Through’ 35 Years Later

Watching Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” movie in middle age is painful. The music and Val Kilmer’s acting are phenomenal. The film, though, feels like being stuck in a bad acid trip, replete with tiresome tropes like the virtuous and wise Native American and the desert as locus of self-actualization.The biopic follows Jim Morrison from his days as a homeless film school drop out to the founding of The Doors to his tragic death at age 27 in Paris. I romanticized “Live fast, die young” and the “27 Club” — a term popularized after the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain for rock stars who die at age 27 — when I was a teen, thinking that the best, most troubled artistic geniuses die young, usually from drug overdoses. Janis Joplin, JimI Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, and Delta blues pioneer Robert Johnson are all members of this so-called club.Now, though, watching Kilmer portray Morrison’s descent into addiction, I could think only: What a waste of a life and a talent. Criticism aside, “The Doors” is worth seeing when the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain screens it next week as part of their Carolco Pictures retrospective. The discomfort is likely Mr. Stone’s point. Released in 1991, 20 years after Morrison’s death, the film portrays the singer as both musical genius and complete train wreck. The movie takes some artistic license with the facts, while adding to the Morrison mystique. He is a rock God clad in leather pants with a book, and later a bottle, in his hands. He is an unpredictable, sometimes violent womanizer, afraid to feel pain, a failed poet, whose ability to sing and create declines as he gets fat and drinks himself into oblivion.Formed in 1965, The Doors are a uniquely Los Angeles band that didn’t follow the 1960s peace-and-love hippie playbook. The lyrics and music are dark, psychedelic and blues-infused rock. They released six albums in five years. The film depicts the ease with which they produced their first album, including the hit song, “Light My Fire.” The final track on that album, “The End,” was truly transgressive for the time, including the Oedipal lyrics about killing one’s father and “Mother? I want to…”Kilmer is fabulously cast as Morrison, not only because he looks like the singer but because he inhabits Morrison on stage. Kilmer recorded his own vocals for the performance scenes, which capture the chaos of the band’s performances. Meg Ryan’s casting as Morrison’s longtime girlfriend, Pamela Courson, is a little harder to swallow, since she’s best known now for romcoms like “When Harry Met Sally” and Sleepless in Seattle.”Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison in ‘The Doors.’ Carolco/Getty ImagesBy the 1991 release of the film, pilgrimages to Morrison’s grave in Paris were already a thing, particularly for the college bro sect, the types with tapestries on their walls. The band had a major resurgence in album sales after “The End” was featured in 1979’s film “Apocalypse Now” and The Doors’ “Greatest Hits” album was released in 1980. In 1981, Rolling Stone ran a cover story, “He’s Jim Morrison: He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, and He’s Dead.” Those who die young are forever sexy. The graffiti-marked grave is shown at the end of the movie. Reducing The Doors to dorm-room speakers, or background music at the grocery store, though, is to ignore how groundbreaking they were for the time. Morrison’s aggressive stage performances and brooding sound presaged the end of the 1960s. At one point in the film, as Morrison’s problems cascade on him, the film flashes scenes that signaled the decade’s end: Charles Manson, napalm bombing in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the election of Richard Nixon. The Doors were already swimming in this chaos. Iggy Pop and the Los Angeles punk band X credit The Doors as a major influence. Billy Idol makes a cameo in the film.The most dated and difficult scene to watch is the peyote desert trip, when the band first makes music together. Morrison tries to “find himself” by following a Native American man on a horse, with “The End” playing over trippy imagery. The Native American keeps returning in visuals throughout the film. Again, this seemed cool in my teens but now it feels played out.The same could be said for the flash appearance of a midget in the hallway of the Velvet Underground hotel scene. David Lynch did this well. In 2026, it feels like a student film movie scene, much like the film’s opening when Morrison screens his own failed student film.The soundtrack propels the movie. The only non-Doors track is the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” Toward the end of the film, Morrison asks his producer, Paul Rothchild, for heroin:“I am not going to participate in anything that’s going to help to accomplish your goal, Jim,” Rothchild says.“What’s my goal, Paul?”“Your only friend, the end.” Paul sings, reciting lyrics to “The End.”In the same scene, a friend of Morrison’s says, “You’ve tested all the limits: fame, fucking, money. What’re you gonna do when the music’s over? When you’re too fat and old to go out on stage. What are you going to do for Act Three – puke on heaven’s door?”“You underestimate the audience,” Morrison says.“Face it, Jim, you’re not going to be remembered.”Mr. Stone’s film was a valiant effort to portray Morrison’s life and helped memorialize the artist. Yet Morrison himself was more complex and artistically dynamic than a biopic, which emphasizes above all his flameout in drugs and alcohol, allows. Are Cobain, Joplin, and Morrison remembered more for their music or their tragic deaths? The deaths fuel the myths and are essential to their stories, but I’d still like to think the life and the work are what matter.

‘The Doors’ Film Still ‘Breaks On Through’ 35 Years Later

‘The Doors’ Film Still ‘Breaks On Through’ 35 Years Later

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