Volume 117: The Stones and Brian Jones / Megan's Dead / Mutiny In Heaven
THE VOICE OF ENERGY VOL. 117
Hello again, friends. I trust this finds you well. As my work and family life is comfortably settling down to a dull roar over the last couple of months, I finally have some additional time to devote to this newsletter — and updating it on the regular. If all goes well, you'll be getting weekly reviews from me in your inbox every Friday. Don't hold me to that, please, but that's the goal.
This week includes reviews of two recent music documentaries and a solid enough comedy / mystery perfect for a night when you need to watch something that requires little mental energy.
The Stones & Brian Jones (2023, dir. Nick Broomfield)
The life and legacy of the late Brian Jones, a founding member of British rock titans the Rolling Stones, is a rich and nuanced subject ripe for exploration in a documentary. Unfortunately for fans of the band and the history of pop music, in general, the person that has opted to take up that particular baton is filmmaker Nick Broomfield.
The British director has had, to put it gently, a checkered career behind the camera. Broomfield has been responsible for some truly impactful work, such as his 2006 fiction film Ghosts which explored an incident at Morecambe Bay when 21 Chinese immigrants were killed trying to harvest cockles, as well as some eye-rolling stunt docs looking to cash in on current events such as 2011’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha! or 1994’s Tracking Down Maggie. His nadir, though, remains 1998’s Kurt and Courtney, a salacious documentary that alleges that Courtney Love had her late husband Kurt Cobain killed.
The Stones and Brian Jones doesn’t nearly sink to those levels, but it is an infuriatingly surface level look at Jones that only skims over his vital contributions to his band to instead concentrate much of its running time to his love life and pat psychological analysis regarding the musician’s difficult relationship with his father.
Broomfield does have a wealth of archival footage at his disposal, including live performances, interviews with the Stones and plenty of film captured by Jones and his friends and hangers-on during the group’s precipitous rise to superstar status. What he’s missing is the participation of any member of the Stones save Bill Wyman, whose poorly-filmed on-camera contributions are mostly listening to songs on cheap speakers and pointing out what Jones played on each one. What bits we get from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts are snippets of interviews the three gave to journalists well after Jones’ unfortunate death in 1969.
The most revealing elements of the film tend to come from Jones’ many romantic relationships. After leaving his family home, he apparently had a pattern of finding a new gal, moving in with her and her family, impregnating her and then disappearing. It left behind five children from five different women. Through interviews with his many lovers, including Anita Pallenberg and French model / actress Zouzou, Jones’s temperamental and tempestuous personality comes to the fore. Broomfield excuses it all, explaining it away as self-sabotage disguising a hunger for stability after he was booted out of his family home by his father. And likely because of the director’s obvious adoration of the musician (the film opens with Broomfield recalling meeting Jones when the filmmaker was only 14 and the impact that left on him), he makes no mention of the physical abuse Jones meted out on some of his partners, especially Pallenberg. His drug and alcohol issues also feel like an afterthought until they become too big to ignore.
Somehow, in spite of Wyman’s quaint guidance, Jones’s importance to the Stones becomes the detail that Broomfield is least interested in. While I would normally praise a music documentary for not cluttering up the proceedings with talking head chatter from critics or contemporary musicians, it’s those very same voices that this film desperately needs. Jones has a devoted cult following among rock fans and players, not least of which is Anton Newcombe who named his long running band the Brian Jonestown Massacre in honor of his favorite Rolling Stone.
The assumption Broomfield approaches this film is that Jones being a part of one of the biggest rock groups of all time is enough to sell whatever tidy theories about the effect of his upbringing on the musician’s creative work and romantic life. It’s not nearly enough.
The Stones and Brian Jones plays in theaters for one night on November 7. The film hits VOD services on November 17.
Mutiny In Heaven: The Birthday Party (2023, dir. Ian White)
N.B. This review originally ran in the Sept 19 edition of Willamette Week.
Filmmaker Ian White made a lot of great decisions when constructing Mutiny in Heaven, his appropriately twitchy and uncompromising documentary about noise-rock pioneers The Birthday Party. The movie is blessedly free of modern fans and critics bloviating about the quintet’s influence and importance. And there’s little in the way of trying to psychoanalyze the motivation behind how the Australian group made their art. The only way to appreciate them is to dive headfirst into the muck with them.
Through copious amounts of archival footage, contemporary interviews with the group’s surviving members, and a soundtrack choked with The Birthday Party’s assaultive music, fans are put in the center of the maelstrom. Led by future elder statesman of rock Nick Cave and the scalding guitar work of Rowland S. Howard, the group burst out of the Australian punk scene like a blood blister, oozing their way to London where they became infamous for their violent live performances and herculean intake of narcotics. They held it together long enough to produce a handful of brilliant albums that fomented the future careers of groups like the Jesus Lizard and Plague Vendor.
Where White flinches is in his overuse of black-and-white animated sequences to bring key offstage moments like the firing of drummer Phill Calvert before the band relocated to Berlin in 1982 or Cave’s drug-induced stupor on a flight to visual life. It only serves to break the spell that the director casts through choices like letting live footage or the surreal video the group made for “Nick the Stripper” play out almost in full. The band, their music, and their seductive personalities already have us by the throat. Watching them flop around in cartoon form only serves to loosen their collective grip.
Mutiny In Heaven will be available through VOD services, beginning on November 7.
Helen's Dead (2023, dir. K. Asher Levin)
Director K. Asher Levin and screenwriter Amy Brown Carver don't make it easy to root for anyone in their new film Helen's Dead. The closest we get to a hero, the titular Helen (Matilda Hutz), spends much of the running time of this fitfully funny whodunnit lying dead in the bedroom of the house being rented by her sister Leila (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) and brother-in-law (a wonderfully simpering Brian Stack).
Otherwise, we are introduced to a series of characters more odious than the next as they arrive one after the other for a dinner party being held by Leila, an Instagram influencer looking to repair her reputation after she flipped out on a fan. Not even Garrett, the seemingly nice guy (Oliver Cooper) who was invited without warning to the fete in hopes of hitting it off with Helen's cousin Addie (Dylan Gelula), comes away unscathed. Like the rest of the cast, his enormous ego gets entirely in the way of him making any kind of meaningful connection with anyone.
When Helen's lifeless body is found, Levin and Carver pivot the movie from an discomfort comedy into something resembling a murder mystery, but only just so. There's little grief or terror at the discovery. Everyone is far too preoccupied with how this death will affect them in the short and long term.
It's a pretty hilarious conceit that the filmmakers barely pull off due to some fairly staid directing and occasionally awkward dialogue. It's all up to the actors to maintain the momentum and the ugliness of this story. On that front, they chose well. The cast is well-chosen with special credit handed down to Emile Hirsch skirting the edge of overacting in his portrayal of an oily asshole who constantly twists his misdeeds (like cheating on Helen with Addie) to make himself the victim or the hero, and Tyrese Gibson who slips into the end of act two with a louche charm and an air of absolute exhaustion at the antics of a bunch of privileged white fools.
There's little to suggest that Helen's Dead is going to move the cultural needle in one direction or another. It rests comfortably in that lukewarm zone of films that may find an audience through streaming services after they've run out of prestige dramas or superhero spectacles to lose themselves in.
Helen's Dead arrives in select theaters and on VOD services starting November 3.
If you'd like to read some other work that I've done recently, here's a small sampling:
-- My interview with Ian Masters of Pale Saints on the recent reissue of his former band's second album In Ribbons
-- My feature on the deliciously weird comedy of Alan Wagner
-- My profiles of the four winners of the 2023 Skidmore Prize, honoring their work in the nonprofit sector
Thanks for reading and subscribing and all that jazz. Feel free to share this with anyone who may care. Back again next week (yes, next week) with more.
Artwork for this edition of The Voice of Energy comes from Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s, a new exhibit opening on November 11 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.