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| You review: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Did the Andy Serkis-starring Ian Dury biopic get your toes tapping and heart pumping, or were you just left with a blocked head?The critics have, for the most part at least, been rather dazzled by this unorthodox biopic of Ian Dury, that unlikely lad of the late 70s and early 80s music scene: a pugacious polio survivor whose lyrical dexterity delved the mucky depths of British society for pearls of wisdom. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a highly theatrical, unsentimental vision of a rambunctious ride through the new wave era, with Andy Serkis wonderfully channelling the late Dury's relentless energy and anarchic spirit, as well as singing all the songs with the original band.Yet some - a minority it must be said - argue that the film's overwhelming emphasis on Dury himself, with Serkis present in almost every frame of the movie, has made for a lopsided take which fails to ground this version of the singer in a believable reality. The people in his life, many of whom Dury treats abominably, are shadowy straw dolls upon whom we struggle to read the great man's imprint.Mat Whitecross's debut solo feature kicks off in the period just before Dury found fame with the Blockheads, and takes us through his years of fame and slow and incremental retirement from the world of pop. We see his struggles with polio at various stages of his life, through flashbacks to the children's hospital where he essentially grew up and in the film's present day, as he is helped out of bed in the mornings by his son Baxter (a decent performance by Son of Rambow's Bill Milner). Along the way there's plenty of evidence that Dury was as tunnel-visioned and self-serving as it's possible for one man to be: a force of nature who blew as many holes in the fabric of the lives of those who surrounded him as any natural disaster might."A barnstorming, passionate performance from Andy Serkis brings 1970s music legend Ian Dury stunningly back to life in this gutsy biopic," writes our own Peter Bradshaw. "It's obviously a labour of love, but it never looks laborious. Serkis's recreation of Dury gave me goosepimples, and his vocals are eerily good.""Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a truly life-affirming and brilliantly unsentimental celebration of the Mockney and his music," writes Channel 4 Film's Ali Caterall. "Serkis was born to play this role, allowing him to make the most of his celebrated physicality and vocal dexterity."This ain't your average rock star biopic either: no insultingly reductive peaks and troughs. Instead, scenes are introduced, non-linear-fashion, via the appropriate conceit of a stage performance: backdrops spring to life, as real-life morphs into pop videos.""Tackling the rise and fall of bolshy proto-punk gobshite Ian Dury, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a riot of clattering noise and kaleidoscopic colour, off-kilter imagery and foul language, all the good things the title promises and much more," writes Time Out's Tom Huddleston. "Whitecross presents Dury as a verbally abusive, dishonest, thoroughly disreputable but endlessly fascinating lyrical genius, exploring his past in a way that informs – but never seeks to explain – his present."A very different view comes from The Times' Ben Machell. "Essentially you're watching one man meander his way towards fame by being a gravel-voiced Del Boy with a tidy line in witty couplets," he writes."Most of the secondary characters are shallow kids' TV show versions of musicians, punks, authority figures or whoever else [the singer] brushes with. The focus remains so tightly on Dury that there is little space to give the context of his life and rise, which even if you're already a fan, is important. You're never entirely sure where you are, both in time and place; there are no allusions to the empowering nature of punk that catalyses the tale; and strangest of all, there's not enough made of the funny, funky music that made him filmworthy in the first place. The result, too often, rings like a missed beat."Personally, I've always found Dury's songs to be the very definition of trite: sparky and salacious, perhaps, but with a strong whiff of Benny Hill or Kenny Everett. Fortunately, the man himself is far more interesting that his music, and Serkis is a performer who is long overdue his spot centrestage. The film is a full-throttle rifle through the life of a fiercely chaotic figure, a man whose disability was clearly not nearly so terrifying to him as the prospect of an ordinary existence.Whitecross's visual dynamics reminded me a little of the approach taken by Nicolas Winding Refn on his recent biopic Bronson, about the prisoner Charles Bronson. Both films examine their subjects through a vaudevillian prism, though Sex & Drugs has the advantage of dealing with a genuinely interesting persona, rather than a cult figure who is truly fascinating only to Loaded-reading types. By the end, I even found myself mentally humming along to the workmanlike chug of the tunes.What did you think of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll? In the grand pantheon of musical biopics, was it up there with 24 Hour Party People and Walk the Line, or down in the depths with Kevin Spacey's Bobby Darin misadventure, Beyond the Sea?Ian DuryBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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