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An honest look at Joe

At long last, I saw Julien Temple’s documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. The reviews I’d read didn’t lie: the film isn’t perfect. The fact that all interviews took place in front of campfires was mildly distracting, as was the fact that none of the interviewees were named. But the footage is fantastic, and the commitment to showing Strummer’s good and bad is continuous. What’s more, Temple makes you believe that such a warts-and-all presentation is exactly what Strummer would have wanted. If you’re a Clash fan, or a fan of Strummer’s later work with the Mescaleros, you’ll really like it. If you’re a fan of art and music, you’ll certainly appreciate it.

Some favorite moments: Johnny Depp’s campfire interview drew laughter from the crowd. The braids in his beard indicate that he’s clearly on a break from shooting some installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and he praises Strummer with vagaries like, “There was a truth in his attack.”

Also, Strummer has the quote of the film. Discussing the fact that The Clash fell into all the stadium-rock pitfalls despite his best efforts to avoid them, Strummer says, and I’m paraphrasing, “We had the addictions, we made the indulgent album, we overdubbed the sound of ants chewing through a beam . . .”

The man had a way with words.