By Cara Nash
WHAT’S IT ABOUT? Lester Bangs is widely regarded as rock music’s greatest critic – a gonzo journalist and gutter poet who lived the lifestyle of his musical heroes, and was treated as a peer by them too. Bangs’ upbringing, however, was anything but rock‘n’roll. Born in 1948, Bangs was raised in California by his suffocating mother, a fanatical Jehovah’s Witness, after his troubled father died in a fire in 1957. The incident haunted the writer his whole life, and perhaps explained his own drug and alcohol addictions. Following his rebellious high school years (during which his obsession with music kicked in), Bangs fell into rock journalism when he responded to an ad for the newly founded Rolling Stone, and then moved on to the rowdier Creem Magazine, which published his most influential work. In 1976, Bangs moved to New York, where he fell in with the punk crowd at CBGB, and fronted a few unsuccessful bands of his own. By the early eighties, however, Bangs’ hard living caught up with him, and he died of a drug overdose at 33-years-old.
WHY WOULD IT MAKE A GOOD MOVIE? First up, as Jim DeRogatis’ superb biography reveals, Lester Bangs was a complex, fascinating, and larger-than-life personality. Underneath the writer’s raging cynicism and bawdy swagger was a tragic romantic lugging around his own personal demons and unrealised dreams. Beyond the personal, however, the life story of Bangs is also the story of rock criticism, and that’s a tale that’s never been told on screen. Many assume that music journalism has been around since the advent of magazines, but it’s an art form born and championed in the sixties by a fistful of passionate dreamers and frustrated musicians, with Bangs leading the pack with his singular, polarising prose. Finally, this would make a cracker of a movie simply due to the soundtrack alone, with the story playing out against rock music’s most explosive years.
WHO SHOULD MAKE IT? Arguably the best scenes in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (the autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s own time as a teen writing for Rolling Stone) were those featuring Lester Bangs (played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman). It only seems fitting then that Crowe – a rock journalist himself who was deeply influenced by Bangs, and whose best film work has always been intertwined with music – would direct this biopic.
WHO SHOULD BE IN IT? Philip Seymour Hoffman was unforgettable in Almost Famous, and this biopic would require a younger actor to cover Bangs’ earlier years. While often seen in scene-stealing support roles (Looper, Meek’s Cutoff, Little Miss Sunshine), Paul Dano has proven his versatility as a leading man with affecting, inventive turns in Ruby Sparks, Being Flynn, For Ellen, Swiss Army Man, and Love & Mercy, the moving biopic on The Beach Boys’ troubled singer-songwriter, Brian Wilson. With his quiet intensity and natural vulnerability, the talented Dano would be an inspired choice as Bangs. In supporting roles, James Franco would be terrific as prickly Creem editor, Barry Kramer; while Rooney Mara would be a natural as Nancy Alexander, the one girl that Bangs never got over.
GOMA’s “Get What You Want: Music Cinema” programme runs from September 2-October 2. For all programming, session, and ticketing information, head to the official site.
