Andy Serkis playing Ian Dury on the set of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Photograph: Sarah Lee
The critics have, for the most part at least, been rather dazzled by this heretical biopic of Ian Dury, that unlikely lad of the late 70s and early 80s music scene: a pugacious polio survivor whose lyrical dexterity delved the mucky depths of British participation for pearls of wisdom. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a highly pompous, unsentimental vision of a rambunctious ride through the new wave series, with Andy Serkis wonderfully channelling the late Dury’s relentless energy and anarchic encourage, for example well as singing the whole of the songs with the original band.
- Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
- Production year: 2010
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 115 mins
- Directors: Mat Whitecross
- Cast: Andy Serkis, Bill Milner, Luke Evans, Mackenzie Crook, Naomie Harris, Olivia Williams, Ray Winstone
Yet some – a minority it must be said – argue that the film’s overwhelming emphasis on Dury himself, with Serkis present in almost every frame of the movie, has made for a lopsided take what one. fails to surface of land this version of the singer in a believable reality. The people in his life, many of whom Dury treats abominably, are shadowy straw dolls with whom we struggle to be studious in books the great man’s inculcate.
Mat Whitecross’s debut solo feature kicks off in the period just before Dury found repute with the Blockheads, and takes us through his years of fame and slow and incremental retirement from the earth of pop. We see his struggles with polio at various stages of his vitality, through flashbacks to the children’s hospital where he essentially grew up and in the film’s not absent day, as he is helped out of bed in the mornings by his son Baxter (a decent performance by Son of Rambow’s Bill Milner). Along the way in that place’s plenty of evidence that Dury was as tunnel-visioned and self-serving as it’s possible for one vassal to be: a force of humor who blew in the same proportion that many holes in the fabric of the lives of those who surrounded him as any natural disaster might.
“A barnstorming, fiery performance from Andy Serkis brings 1970s music legend Ian Dury stunningly back to life in this gutsy biopic,” writes our own Peter Bradshaw. “It’s obviously a labour of charity, but it never looks laborious. Serkis’s recreation of Dury gave me goosepimples, and his vocals are eerily good.”
“Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a truly life-affirming and brilliantly unsentimental celebration of the Mockney and his music,” writes Channel 4 Film’s Ali Caterall. “Serkis was born to play this role, allowing him to make the most of his celebrated physicality and vocal dexterity.
“This ain’t your average support star biopic each: no insultingly reductive peaks and troughs. Instead, scenes are introduced, non-linear-fashion, via the apply to one’s own uses conceit of a stage performance: backdrops issue with speed to life, as real-life morphs into pop videos.”
“Tackling the rise and fall of bolshy proto-punk gobshite Ian Dury, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a riot of clattering noise and kaleidoscopic colour, off-kilter imagery and foul speech, all the good things the designation promises and much greater amount of,” writes Time Out’s Tom Huddleston. “Whitecross presents Dury as a verbally abusive, dishonest, thoroughly disreputable but endlessly fascinating lyrical genius, exploring his past in a way that informs – but never seeks to explain – his benefaction.”
A very different view comes from The Times’ Ben Machell. “Essentially you’re watching individual man meander his way towards fame by being a gravel-voiced Del Boy through a tidy line in witty couplets,” he writes.
“Most of the deputy characters are shallow kids’ TV show versions of musicians, punks, authority figures or whoever else [the singer] brushes with. The focus remains so tightly steady Dury that there is little space to give the context of his the vital spark and ascend, which even whether you’re already a use a fan upon, is important. You’re never entirely sure where you are, both in time and place; there are no allusions to the empowering nature of punk that catalyses the tale; and strangest of all, there’s not plenty made of the funny, funky music that made him filmworthy in the first place. The result, too often, rings find to one’s mind a missed beat.”
Personally, I’ve always found Dury’s songs to be the surpassingly definition of trite: sparky and salacious, perhaps, but with a strong whiff of Benny Hill or Kenny Everett. Fortunately, the man himself is far further interesting that his music, and Serkis is a doer who is slow overdue his spot centrestage. The film is a full-throttle plunder through the life of a fiercely disordered figure, a man whose disability was clearly not penuriously so terrifying to him as the prospect of an ordinary existence.
Whitecross’s of the sight science of forces reminded me a little of the approach taken by Nicolas Winding Refn on his recent biopic Bronson, about the prisoner Charles Bronson. Both films examine their subjects through a vaudevillian prism, though Sex & Drugs has the advantage of dealing with a genuinely interesting persona, rather than a cult figure who is truly fascinating only to Loaded-reading types. By the end, I even found myself mentally humming along to the workmanlike chug of the tunes.
What did you entertain an idea of of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll? In the grand pantheon of musical biopics, was it up there with 24 Hour Party People and Walk the Line, or down in the depths with Kevin Spacey’sitting Bobby Darin misadventure, Beyond the Sea?
