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Rocking in a Hard Place

How 2007 became the year cinema got the music right

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"Of all people, Kurt was a product of his environment," Schnack points out. "I think when people think of Kurt being a contradiction -- how he felt about fame -- some people think he abhorred fame. That's not the truth. He listened to Queen, Cheap Trick, Kiss, Black Sabbath. That's what it meant to him to be a rock star. And then he moves to a place where you thumb your nose at that, Olympia. Here's a city where there's a record label called Kill Rock Stars. There's this battle of the values of Aberdeen and the battle of the values of Olympia. I wanted to put these two cities in stark contrast to each other.

"It also speaks to both his presence and his absence. Both these towns will be identified for what he did there. But life goes on."

This relationship between the director and subject often seems to inform the approach to the movie. Schnack admits to being what sounds like a typical Nirvana fan, one who might have taken a passing listen to Bleach but was hooked by Nevermind. Other directors work from either a lifelong passion for their subject, like Haynes and Bob Dylan, or had a personal connection to their subject, as Temple did with The Clash's Joe Strummer. Clearly, films such as Taylor Hackford's Ray and James Mangold's Walk the Line came from directors who went from fan to collaborator; each worked with his subject before the subject's death. The result may be loving tributes with the mandatory revealing of the artistic dark side, but neither really surprised with its structure.

You can trace this approach back to Oliver Stone's trippy but predictable take on Jim Morrison in 1991's The Doors and even softer works such as The Buddy Holly Story. Is it any surprise that there's been no vibrant Elvis Presley story on film?

"I tend to dislike the kind of Hollywood biopic approach where you can have a movie like Walk the Line and a movie like Ray, and you can intercut them and they'd be the same movie, the only problem being one's black and one's white," Temple says. "The clichés of both stories kick in at exactly the same time in both movies. They follow the Hollywood dictum of what makes an efficient plot, and are virtually interchangeable. It reduces the magic of someone like Johnny Cash and Ray Charles to the lowest common denominator, and it's pretty appalling that that's allowed to happen."

But getting too close to a subject is just as risky, and Temple somehow evokes a loving tribute while capturing the complexity that was Strummer.

Like Dylan, he changed identities as it suited him, and Temple deftly chronicles those changes through Strummer's own words, and what at first might seem like the "usual suspects." But the twist is in the execution, as Temple places most of his interview subjects around a bonfire reminiscent of those Strummer hosted at the Glastonbury music festival, in which everyone was invited to say his piece in an artistic exchange of ideas. While critics rightly felt a bit thrown off by the technique (which Temple also employed in his recent documentary about the festival), it fits perfectly with his artistic sensibility.

"I think one of the big problems is the curse of the talking head ... in these kind of films," says Temple, a music-video maverick who also directed two documentaries about the Sex Pistols. "In this sense, the campfire was a good device for me because it had some mystery. When you light people with fire, you see their faces in the flames and they disappear. The camera is hidden behind the flames from them ... it's in the darkness. They're no longer aware that it's there after a while. You get this feeling of people telling stories and conversing rather than being grilled in some kind of spotlight.

"I also think that one of Joe's main messages was like a lot of the kind of central punk message was, really make sure that you think for yourself, and that thinking is not just a chore; it's a beautiful, liberating thing if you do it," Temple adds. "I like the idea that you have to think for a bit. Is that the prime minister of Chechnya or is it Mick Jones? Those little riddles are kind of good in a film."

Corbijn also came from a visual background going into his feature-film debut, Control, a fact-based account of Ian Curtis, the lead singer for Joy Division. A renowned photographer and music-video director, Corbijn once shot photos of the band but says his personal relationship with the group ended there. Still, Control brims with intimacy even while creating a human portrait of a troubled soul. But where many biopics become subsumed in the artist's self-destructive tendencies, Ian Curtis' downward spiral earns an original portrait.