‘Come For The Swearing, Stay For The Ridiculous Boasts': Go See The Liam Gallagher Doco

LIAM GALLAGHER: AS IT WAS

★★★

The reason you’d watch a Liam Gallagher documentary is the same reason you’d read a Liam Gallagher interview. Come for the swearing, stay for the ridiculous boasts and dismissals of peers. Gallagher’s great artistry isn’t making music, but talking shit. His sneer in, say, Champagne Supernova can grate, but him calling his brother, Noel, a “potato” is forever sweet to the ears.

“I know how fucking great I am and I know how shit I am,” Gallagher says, as the very first quote, in Liam Gallager: As It Was. And, with that, we’re off to the races. But the journey, and the destination, in this documentary, come as a surprise.

As It Was is the sentimental, sweet-natured, warm-hearted Gallagher-brothers documentary you never knew you needed. It’s a film that peers behind the cartoon-character, chronicling the infamous fall and second-chance comeback of a capital-r Rockstar who, when not — or perhaps even while — cramming “gack” up his nose and berating paparazzi, really loves his mum. Loves his kids. Loves — and is eternally grateful to — his partner/manager, Debbie Gwyther, the bedrock beneath his recent revival.

Gwyther, in turn, provides the clearest character-attribution soundbites herein. “[Liam’s] antagonistic, super-sensitive, impulsive, very arrogant at times, fearless, and more ambitious than he thinks he is,” she pronounces. “He drinks too much, he gets in scrapes, he’s impulsive, he says stupid things, he swears a lot, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be soft at the same time.” And that’s essentially what As It Was does: mount a ‘soft’ portrait of a hard man.

In that spirit, the absence of Noel — whom Liam hasn’t seen since Oasis’s breakup — is played not for comedy, but tragedy. Oasis: Supersonic was the nostalgic trip through Brit-pop and band blow-ups, where sibling bickering was viewed, uncritically, as part-and-parcel of the ‘lad’ culture Oasis symbolised. Here, however, the split between Liam and Noel is viewed as an open wound; something that hurts the Gallaghers’ saintly mother, but definitely the younger sibling.

Of course, Liam also says: “A lot of people go, ‘Noel’s changed,’ but he’s changed into a massive cunt. I’m just still a cunt, I’m not a massive cunt”; his sage wisdom almost paraphrasing TISM. But the lesson of As It Was is essentially that a big heart beats beneath the bluster. Liam seems less coked-up con-man, more aging mystic, attributing his unlikely success — two brothers arising from one tenement bedroom to take over the rock’n’roll world — to vague ideas of fate, magic, spirits, stars, and, perhaps, even aliens. As you were.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

★★★

In the wake of the reprehensible Yesterday — and, for those with long memories, the awful 2007 musical Across The Universe — no one wants to see a cinematic excuse to play Beatles songs again. But what about Bruce Springsteen? Blinded By The Light arrives on screens at a time in which its premise — a ‘Springsteen musical’ in which the songs of The Boss are the centre, the spirit, and the narrative engine — will be viewed with due scepticism; audiences chastened by hollow shrines to classic-rock hits. But, sometimes such proximity can also do a film a great favour. And, when compared to Yesterday, Blinded By The Light is better at every turn; effectively feeling like the Rocketman to Yesterday’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

With shamelessly-crowd-pleasing shades of her beloved 2002 hit Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha — fictionalising the coming-of-age story in a Bruce-loving memoir by journalist Sarfraz Manzoor — tells the tale of a Desi immigrant in England who defies their conservative family and rises above small-minded intolerance through a love of an adopted pastime. Only, this time, it’s not soccer, but Springsteen. In a 1987 of Thatcherism and National Front marches, Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, stonewash and poodle perms, teenaged Javed (Viveik Kalra) discovers the music of The Boss, and finds his mind, and his world, blown right open.

In the movie’s grandest gestures, Chadha splatters the words of the songwriter across the screen in stylised intertitles, or fashions Bruce tunes into bona fide musical numbers (there’s shades of Chantal Akerman’s 1986 postmodernist-musical Golden Eighties). Characters sing Springsteen songs to themselves, or quote them in dialogue. But the film also interrogates their meaning, addressing the issues of class, alienation, and outsiderdom in the lyrics. This isn’t a mere jukebox musical, erecting a flimsy narrative to get us from one hit to the next. Instead, it’s a warm-hearted, sincere, genuinely-sweet tribute to the power of music in helping young people find a sense of self-identity and belonging.

JUDY

★★★

There’s Oscarbait, there’s shameless Oscarbait, and then there’s Judy. It’s a film filled with movie-biz lore. A tale of the Hollywood dream factory, in both the brightness of its stars and the darkness of its troubled past. A biopic about a celebrity after a fall, proving they’ve still got it. A picture that literally opens on the set of The Wizard Of Oz. And a movie that, even as you watch it, feels more like an Oscar campaign than an actual drama.

So it goes with Renee Zellweger out front of this Judy Garland biopic, throwing herself headlong into that most beloved of Oscar tropes: uncanny mimickry of a famous person. It’s a dramatic riff on the narrative first delivered via the musical End Of The Rainbow: here’s late-in-life Garland, still riding the rollercoaster of fame — and uppers and downers — decades after her teenage superstardom. She’s drunk, strung out, “unreliable and uninsurable”, but, boy, can she still belt out a tune.

In pretty much the exact same story as we saw in a recent piece of failed Oscarbait, Stan & Ollie, a past-their-prime big-name American act heads for a series of shows in jolly old England. There, their star wattage remains, and shows that initially seem like a disaster turn out to be a rousing final act, before the curtain closes for good, and a final title card tastefully intones their subsequent death and unbowed greatness. And, in turn, lots of Judy feels overly familiar, even pro forma; like we’re going through the Hollywood-biopic machinations.

But, Judy is kept alive, and given real life, by Zellweger’s oh-so-committed performance. Whilst the flashbacks to Garland’s studio-slavery adolescence (where she’s played by Darci Shaw) feel all too instructive, the transitions from past to present are clunky, and director Rupert Goold betrays his theatrical background with a decidedly uncinematic staginess, none of these things are terminal failures in the face of Zellweger’s turn. The best way to describe it is that you can’t look away, not out of its sheer magnetism, but because she’s always up to something. Always doing something, and doing a lot of it. The Academy tends to award performances less for the best acting, more for the most acting. And, given such, you may as well just hand Zellweger the Oscar now.

PAVAROTTI

★★

Luciano Pavarotti was a big man with a big voice. Those wanting to know more, to feel more, will be left wanting by Ron Howard’s hagiographic docu-portrait of the world’s most famous opera singer. With its familiar presentation — talking heads, archival images, in-concert performances — and wholly uncritical air, it’s a film out only to reassert its subject’s unimpeachable greatness.

In turn, its tone effectively is pitched somewhere between effusive eulogy and brand-managing product; Pavarotti a collection of clips, soundbites, and anecdotes in search of an actual cinematic narrative.

With Howard on the docket, you might be expecting something with sharper storytelling; perhaps, even, a critical perspective. Instead, he’s seemingly fulfilling the same role, here, as he did when he slipped into the Solo director’s chair mid-shoot: piloting an expensive, IP-branded, already-in-production movie to the finish line, with his only requirement fan service.

Pavarotti is another rockumentary designed to please fans and win converts. If you have no interest in the music, then the film is of no interest. It’s cruel to compare something this generic to, say, Asif Kapadia’s Amy, but that comparison throws Pavarotti into stark relief. This is a film of surface-level presentation and examination, the kind of movie for those who want their entertainers to be larger-than-life figures; big men with big voices but no messy humanity, or anything to make a fan feel uneasy.