Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

The time is ripe for a documentary on the life and achievements of the great Joe Strummer. Since the Clash singer died suddenly in 2002 of a congenital heart defect, his stature as a rock icon seems to grow daily. This makes Julian Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten all the more disappointing—it should be definitive, yet it’s on many counts shallow and uninformative.

Temple—whose punk cred comes from directing two Sex Pistols films, 1980’s Malcolm McLaren bilge-fest The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and 2000’s The Filth and the Fury—makes his biggest mistake in recruiting celebrities to affirm Strummer’s influence. The stars creep in gradually, but by three-quarters of the way through have positively taken over. Among the hot air–spewers are Flea, Matt Dillon, Bono, Steve Buscemi, Courtney Love and, most annoyingly, Johnny Depp (sporting a dually braided beard, no less), who offers such chestnuts as, “When The Clash got really huge they must have been frightened that it would taint their ability to be honest.”

Temple also manages to debase Strummer’s youth (and, indeed, distinctiveness) through stale MTV-generation montages (e.g., Someone saying, “In 1968, the whole world was exploding,” while the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” accompanies footage of Bridget Bardot emerging from a jet). There are occasional virtues to this: one of Temple’s strategies to include clips from adaptations of Orwell—such as Joy Batchelor and John Halas’s 1954 animated version of Animal Farm—which sometimes act as appropriate comments on Strummer’s philosophies; there are animated doodles from Strummer’s notebooks, to boot. But these are still gimmicks. One need hardly add—even based on the scant characterization Temple gives us—that the man himself would not have approved. WAIT FOR THE DVD

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is now playing at the Royal (608 College St.).