A personality and an era come to life in “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten,” a busy documentary about the Clash’s charismatic frontman.
Joe Strummer emerges in this film as a natural-born ringmaster, a man who landed in the right place at the right time. Then, when the right time ended, he struggled to find another place — a search that makes the second half of this movie as interesting as the first.
Born to a career diplomat and raised partly in boarding schools, Strummer wasn’t exactly the working-class hero he might have seemed from his public image. But the movie demonstrates how, long before he got famous as a singer, Strummer chose the streets and the artists for his company.
Director Julian Temple, who’s spent much of his career chronicling music, was shooting footage of the early shows of the Clash in 1976 (although he got sidetracked into documenting the Sex Pistols instead). The look and feel of Britain in the mid-1970s, and the attendant explosion of punk rock, is wonderfully captured in this dizzying array of footage.
Strummer died at 50 of a congenital heart problem in 2002, but he still “narrates” the film, in frank recollections about his life. These include voiceovers from a brilliant radio show he hosted for a few years at the end of his life.
Also joining the conversation is a large group of friends, filmed around a campfire. The campfire, emerging late in the film, was for Strummer a symbol of communication and community, developed during his appearances around a campfire at the Glastonbury Festival.
These friends include people we’ve never heard of and celebrities alike (among the latter, Johnny Depp, John Cusack and Matt Dillon). They also number members of the Clash, notably Mick Jones and Topper Headon.
But Strummer’s own voice carries the day, and it includes plenty of self-criticism. He admits that by the time the Clash had broken through to worldwide popularity in the early 1980s, the band was in danger of behaving like the bands that Strummer had always ripped. The band fell apart shortly thereafter. (He also admits that he gave himself the name Joe Strummer after his guitar playing — he wasn’t good enough to play “all the fiddly bits,” but he could strum.)
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Clash really did seem like music’s hope, a way for rock to find a new voice and become vital again. (This is emphasized by a vintage clip of David Lee Roth wondering why the Clash can’t just lighten up.) Strummer, in this film, is seen clearly as the driving force and holy fool behind that effort.
One of his oldest friends remembers Strummer as sometimes exasperating in his desire to experience life at a certain level: “He’d sleep out under the stars when it was totally unnecessary,” she says, perplexed. Have you ever heard a better confirmation of someone’s singular spark?
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