by Erin Free
Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Michael Lindsay Hogg
Intro:
...measured and heartfelt but scrupulously honest and unhesitating...
To casual observers, rock titans The Rolling Stones exist very much in the towering twin pop cultural pillars of frontman Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards. To those with a more vested interest in this towering rock band, however, the figure of Brian Jones (along with, of course, other major players in Charlie Watts, Billy Wyman, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood) is of near equal importance.
Brian Jones co-founded The Rolling Stones and really drove the band’s early adoption of American blues music as its stylistic template. Brian Jones’ late-sixties sacking from the band, and soon thereafter death from drowning in his own swimming pool, meant of course that he wasn’t there for the band’s ascendance to the position of true godheads, so he has always been something of a footnote in the very chequered history of The Stones, unfairly and summarily tossed in with other ultimately damaged fellow travellers like Gram Parsons, Robert Fraser, Donald Cammell, Anita Pallenberg, and Marianne Faithfull. Jones’ standing in the history of The Rolling Stones, however, should be much more exalted than that, and Nick Broomfield’s new doco The Stones And Brian Jones makes a rock-solid fist of setting things right.
Something of a proto-Louis Theroux, Brit documentarian Nick Broomfield is most famed for placing himself right in the middle of dark, dangerous and often highly salacious situations in unforgettable flicks like Chicken Ranch, The Leader, His Driver And The Driver’s Wife, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling Of A Serial Killer, Fetishes and Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. He’s also made a host of fascinating, if no less scabrous, music docos with Kurt & Courtney, Biggie & Tupac and Whitney: Can I Be Me. Hardly known for his sensitivity, Broomfield usually goes for the dirt and the dark stuff, but The Stones And Brian Jones takes a far different approach. Though certainly no exercise in hagiography, Broomfield seems to truly love and admire his subject here (the director even recounts a pleasant encounter he had with the polite and charming Jones as a teenage fan), and he works hard to leaven the darker elements of the Jones story by looking at things from a more positive perspective.
Interestingly ignoring the much-discussed mysterious circumstances surrounding Jones’ death from drowning (theories have long circulated – notably in Stephen Woolley’s downbeat and horribly unpleasant 2005 biopic Stoned, and Danny Garcia’s conspiracy-laden doco Rolling Stone: Life And Death Of Brian Jones – that Jones was murdered or killed accidentally by workmen labouring on his country estate), Broomfield concentrates instead on Jones’ strained relationship with his parents, his love of music, his forming of The Rolling Stones with Mick and Keith, and his quick rise to fame. Bill Wyman is a major figure in the production of The Stones And Brian Jones, and he passionately speaks of Jones’ musical gifts and importance in The Stones legend.
Brian Jones’ singularly unpleasant character traits, however, are not glossed over. The diminutive musician was capable of being nastily and casually cruel, and had an unusual habit of insinuating himself into the lives of his various girlfriends’ families, getting said girlfriends pregnant, and then leaving them to raise the children, with at least five officially known. This is all absorbingly laid out via mostly audio interviews played over the top of expertly assembled archival footage, much of it new and unseen, but a lot of it not. The depiction of Jones’ eventual marginalisation in The Stones via the growing songwriting brilliance of Mick and Keith, and subsequent spiral into alcoholism and drug abuse, is as painful to witness as ever, and it makes The Stones And Brian Jones an often heartbreaking watch.
There is an overflowing abundance of information floating around out there about The Rolling Stones from all manner of sources (much of it enjoyably reputable, and some even more enjoyably disreputable), and Nick Broomfield’s measured, heartfelt but scrupulously honest and unhesitating documentary The Stones And Brian Jones is a worthy addition to the ever growing and expanding multimedia pantheon that has fascinatingly evolved around The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World.
The Stones And Brian Jones is screening at The British Film Festival. Click here for all touring, venue and ticketing details.
