DYING young, according to only partially tongue-in-cheek music industry
folklore, is a smart career move. Check out at the pinnacle of your fame and
you will most likely leave a good-looking corpse. More importantly, you are
virtually guaranteed huge record sales.
Commercially speaking, Elvis Presley’s 70th anniversary year is already his
busiest and most lucrative since his untimely death in 1977. The King even
topped the singles chart, as did the legendary rapper Tupac Shakur,
performing a new duet with Elton John despite being inconveniently dead from
gunshot wounds since 1996. Meanwhile, John Lennon fills seats on Broadway in
the musical Lennon and the late Freddie Mercury’s high-camp anthems
still pack theatres from London to Las Vegas in We Will Rock You.
But nobody loves dead rock stars more than Hollywood. The same tragic plane
crash in 1959 inspired both The Buddy Holly Story and La Bamba.
Heroin overdoses finished off Jim Morrison in The Doors and Sex
Pistol Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy. With screen biographies of Brian
Jones, Johnny Cash, Tupac, Janis Joplin, Phil Lynott, Nico, Ian Curtis and
more on the way, this breaking wave of pop post mortems is turning tidal.
The tragic glamour of rockers who burn out rather than fade away has long
fascinated film-makers. But Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, which
arrives here soon, is probably the least glamorous rock biopic made. The
third instalment in a loose trilogy about untimely death, after Gerry
and Elephant, this meditation on Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s lonely
slide into suicide in 1994 drains a dramatic story of almost any drama.
Virtually plotless, denuded of dialogue or character detail, it feels more
like conceptual art than cinema.
“I wanted the film to be an abstraction, not a literal depiction,” says Van
Sant. “The original idea was to make a biographical film about Kurt Cobain,
but it felt like a wrong turn. Trying to explain a life, it really became
too much. It’s all fiction, even though we have a lot of information about
Kurt. Those particular days are kind of lost days, and that was the appeal
to me. It’s more of a poem about Kurt.”
Charles Cross, the author of the acclaimed Cobain biography Heavier than
Heaven, has no intention of seeing Last Days. Having just
published the life story of another doomed Seattle rocker, Room Full of
Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, Cross sees little point in
mythologising dead musicians. “There has been so much garbage, myth and
falsehood around Kurt’s death,” says Cross. “His true final days were so
strange; why would anyone feel the need to make them up?”
Van Sant insists that Last Days is not just about Cobain but also an
oblique epitaph for other absent friends. One is River Phoenix, who starred
in Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho in 1991 and died of a drug
overdose two years later. Another is Elliot Smith, the depressive songwriter
who wrote the score for Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting in 1997,
and killed himself in 2003.
Thurston Moore, of the veteran alternative rock stalwarts Sonic Youth, acted
as musical advisor on Last Days. A friend and mentor to Cobain, he
expresses relief that Van Sant avoided conventional big-screen melodrama.
“They make thousands of these bio-pics, and they’re horrible,” Moore says. “Basquiat
was kind of interesting, and 24 Hour Party People was good. But Sid
and Nancy? What a travesty.”
For Michael Pitt, who plays the Cobain-like protagonist of Last Days,
our fascination with doomed rock stars is largely about mourning their
unrealised potential. “It’s similar to James Dean,” he says. “It’s not so
much what Dean did, it’s where he was going to go. But also there is this
element of, when they’re so good, how can they last? There is definitely a
romance to that.”
The director Oliver Stone certainly swallowed that romantic myth with his 1991
film The Doors, an operatic love letter to the band’s Dionysian
singer Jim Morrison, who overdosed in the bath in Paris in 1971. For Stone,
Morrison was tapping into a cultural archetype that pre-dates rock music.
“It’s not just rock stars,” says Stone “It’s movie stars, too, and writers,
poets . . . anybody that something tragic happens to, it elevates them. Jack
Kerouac died young, Hemingway shot himself, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a
miserable, drunken second half to his life. There’s charisma to it, and an
element of the macabre.”
Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, certainly met a macabre
end at the bottom of his swimming pool in 1969. A cinematic explanation for
his controversial death is now being promised by Backbeat producer
Stephen Woolley, who makes his directing debut with the forthcoming Jones
biopic, Stoned.
“That whole 1969 period was the end of decadence, the end of hedonism,”
Woolley argues. “There was Brian’s death, followed by Hendrix, Janis Joplin,
Jim Morrison. It’s a great story of that time.”
But iconic rock martyrdom did not die out with flower power. The suicide in
1980 of Ian Curtis, the singer with the Manchester band Joy Division, will
soon be marked by Anton Corbijn, the celebrated Dutch rock photographer who
moved to Britain in 1979 after becoming infatuated with the band.
Tentatively titled Control, Corbijn’s film is based on Touching
from a Distance, the memoirs of Curtis’s widow, Debbie. Musing on the
appeal of rock stars dying young, Corbijn says: “Generally those people died
in tragic circumstances — overdose, suicide or being shot. That adds to the
drama, especially if it’s suicide. You think their psyche must have been
very interesting or damaged.”
Dying young undoubtedly bestows extra mythic significance on musicians. If
they were still alive they might well still inspire films, but not the
canonisation they have secured from beyond the grave.
ROCKING BEYOND THE GRAVE
Johnny Cash
Joaquin Phoenix portrays the Man in Black in James Mangold’s meaty biopic Walk
the Line
Tupac and Biggie
In Notorious Sylvester Stallone plays Russell Poole, a Los
Angeles police officer caught in the crossfire between slain rappers Tupac
Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. Fearsome hip-hop mogul Marion “Suge” Knight will
reportedly play himself
Phil Lynott
A film about the hard-living Thin Lizzy frontman is currently being adapted
from My Boy, the 1996 book by his mother Philomena, with CSI star
Gary Dourdan as Lynott and Holly Hunter as Philomena
Janis Joplin
Two pics are reportedly on standby, one starring Pink and the other Renée
Zellweger
Keith Moon
The Who drummer may be played by Mike Myers, with Nicolas Cage as Pete
Townshend
