DVD Review: “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten”
Rating: 92
The leader of The Clash was a fully self-invented man, and as Julian Temple’s exhilarating documentary “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten” illustrates, the punk who was born John Mellor spent nearly the last 20 years of his life not knowing what to do with his invention. Strummer was a charismatic idealist, and when he died in 2002 of a congenital heart condition, rock music lost one of its most important guiding lights.
Temple (“The Great Rock and Roll Swindle”) employs an unusual device for his background interviews, shooting friends and colleagues seated around campfires with no one identified by onscreen titles. We see people who knew him when he was a hippie squatter who called himself “Woody,” and we also see bandmate Mick Jones and well-known friends such as Bono, but Temple equalizes them all in this setting — one that makes total sense in the end. Furthermore, Temple compiles footage of The Clash playing “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” that make a lot of modern punk bands sound like Norah Jones.
After The Clash disintegrated without dignity in 1986, Strummer spent many years adrift, working on occasional soundtracks for Alex Cox films and recording only sporadically. He finally regained his love for performing in the late ‘90s and found joy in creating community, but for his millions of fans, Strummer’s time in the wilderness was lost time — time when he could have been exploring new rhythms and shouting in his signature bark about the world’s stupidities. “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten” makes that loss feel even greater.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I was really looking forward to this movie, but found myself underwhelmed. I think it was the device of the campfires; it made sense in the end, but seemed to give too much weight to that portion of his life. I liked the use of his radio broadcasts as a narrative tool.
Ultimately, I think I went in looking for a Joe Strummer documentary, but after it was over I realized I just wanted a documentary about the Clash.