Gimme Danger

If you're expecting another quirky, brooding Jim Jarmusch film, or even that Jarmusch signature here and there, you will be disappointed. Gimme Danger is still a great film, but Jarmusch doesn't do what he usually does - show that the conventional can be really far out if you excavate a little - because he gets that Iggy and the Stooges are already supremely avante-garde; they are already Jim Jarmuschy. So Jarmusch does the opposite - he brings that down to earth, and just showcases what's already naturally there rather than try to create something. Still, documentary filmmaking turns out to be well suited for at least a couple of Jarmusch creative sensibilities. There's a charming, amiable leading man (Iggy), and when Iggy speaks there's a subtly comedic element, and subtle comedy is essential in all Jarmusch films. When Iggy tells the story of contacting Moe Howard of The Three Stooges, there's no need for direction with a magic touch. Just let it be.

Ultimately, Jarmusch forgoes being a director with a Jarmusch vision in Gimme Danger other than maybe hoping to convince the viewer to believe, after watching this film, that Iggy and the Stooges are the greatest rock and roll band of all time. He made Gimme Danger as a fan more than as Jim Jarmusch the auteur director, and it ends up being a "normal" kind of rock and roll doc/tribute, with plenty of great music and great footage, history, and lots of interviewing.

So to repeat, don't expect Gimme Danger to be a typical Jim Jarmusch film. But if you expect it to be a loving and intelligent tribute to a rock and roll band that "reinvented music as we know it" according to their former manager, a band that wiped out the 60s according to Iggy, you won't be disappointed.

"Gimme Danger" (2016 release; 108 min.) is a documentary about the Stooges. As the movie opens, we are in 1973, with the band in a free fall and ready to call it a day, as we get Iggy, Steve MacKay, and other to comment about how bad it was. Pop, then 24 years old, moved back in with his parents in their trailer, After the movie's opening credits, we then go back in time, and we see the humble Ann Arbor roots of these guys, and the even humbler beginnings of the Iguanas and later the Stooges.

Couple of comments: this is the latest movie directed by indie film maker Jim Jarmusch. Here he brings the story of the Stooges, as told to us by the band members themselves, although let's be clear: Iggy gets most of the screen time. Turns out Iggy is quite funny and self-depreciating, certainly as to the early years, when he switch from drums ("I got tired of looking at butts", ha!) to singer and front man. It is quite amazing how the Stooges' sound evolved from the early avant-garde sound (Iggy: "it was like an airplane taking off") to the punk sound of the latter days (the "Raw Power" album). The footage is okay but there is surprisingly not much high quality concert footage (one of the better clips is the classic from their 1970 set at the Cincinnati Pop Festival where Iggy smears peanut butter all over himself while he is crowd-surfing). The lack of high quality footage is more than compensated by the gazillion pictures, which frankly suit the legacy of the Stooges better than the archival footage. The documentary thankfully spends little to no time explaining the 3 decades between the 1973 demise and the 2003 "reunification" (as Iggy terms it, "it's NOT a reunion"), and even the years since 2003 are dealt with in 10-15 minutes. The documentary smartly focused on the key years in the late 60s and early 70s, and that is what makes it so enjoyable to watch. No major revelations, just a solid look at the Stooges. As of course Iggy has the documentary's last words: "I don't wanna be metal, I don't wanna be alternative, I don't want to be punk. I just wanna be".

"Gimme Danger" premiered at the Cannes film festival earlier this years, and finally opened at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati this weekend. I couldn't wait to see it. The Friday early evening screening where I saw this at was not attended well (2 other guys besides myself), but I know this: all three of us laughed a lot and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, Hopefully "Gimme Danger" can find a wider audience via Amazon Instant Video and eventually on DVD/Blu-ray. If you are a fan of music and music history, you don't want to miss this. "Gimme Danger" is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

So what is this? A quite conventional musical documentary embedding a bands history within a bigger history of society and musical appearances and hereby constantly arguing the uniqueness, the coolness and the relevance of The Stooges and their professional anti-professionalism. It has the same sort of bohemian snobbish feeling to it I already found disgusting in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE: all this bitter mystifying praise of the „real", „authentic", „good", „true", etc., artistic stuff within a devilish sell-out Disneyland world is just soo much emphasized that it's actually ridiculing itself.

But at the same time it is a fanboy work and a work of friendship, a film not only about the band, but a film in dedication for the band, a gift, an openly political and explicitly personal attempt to immortalize the musicians, communists, existentialists, drug users and drug abusers around Iggy Pop: „The Stooges Forever!", it says on the gong starting and finishing the film. And this is basically the sole purpose the film is made for and this is what adds quite a bit of intimidating intimacy to it, making it more like a letter to Iggy only masked as this educational musical documentary it is trying to be at its surface. This is no offense: The naive and sincere face under the mask is what turns the film into touching cinema, after all. And the sound, well, the sound made me heart jump around hard every once in a while.

A friend of my recommended this documentary to me. Just randomly heard about it and was enough of a Jim Jarmusch fan to want to try it out, and he loved it, despite not being a fan of the Stooges, or having it change his mind about their music. As much as it was an in-depth look on Iggy Pop and the Stooges, it's just as much an in-depth look on Rock and Roll, and every Rock and Roll Documentary should be.

I gave it a shoot, as I am a fan of the Stooges and what they have done. After all, I'm sure a lot of the music I listen to they directly or indirectly are responsible for.

Going into the movie, I was expecting somewhat an adaption of the book Please Kill Me, which was an in-depth look at protopunk, which I herd the Stooges be described as before, plus they take up a big chuck of the book, but that's not what this doc is at all. It was so focus on the Stooges that it rarely expanded outside of the band members and those really close to them.

As the only original surviving member at the time of this release, Iggy does a lot of the talking, but not in an egotistical way. He seemed very genuine in his stories about The Stooges and their history. Not that the other Stooges did not get to chime as it looks like Jarmusch had been working on this for a while with the drummer of the Stooges also able to tell his stories before his death.

It is all about rock and roll and all about the music. I can see why Jarmusch selected and loves this band as they seem uncompromising to their love of the music. It's a great message on sticking with it. It also a great message about how it never dies within you, as the doc tells the story of the Stooges second guitarist James Williamson, who rolled with the band and Iggy until they dissolved got himself a pretty square life, but when Iggy calls to say come Jam with the band like 40 years later, he did just that.

Not Just for those people who love the Stooges, it's for those who love a really good rock and roll story. This is one!

Early in the film, Iggy mentions how Soupy Sales taught him to keep his writing concise and to-the-point (the kid-show host instructed that letters sent by viewers be twenty-five words or less). The lesson is not lost on Jim Jarmusch, who promises a documentary about the career of the Stooges and delivers exactly that. We get a recap of how they came together, followed by a solid recounting of their brief moment in the spotlight. When they fall apart in '73, the story stops abruptly, then jumps ahead to the group's revival in 2003 (with just a couple of words about what the Ashetons and James Williamson did in the interim). Iggy's solo career is almost completely unmentioned; fitting, as this is a Stooges doc, not an Iggy bio. Though he does get the lion's share of screen time, his recollections here are centered on the band, not himself.

Likewise, the interviews are limited to participants: the band members (minus original bassist David Alexander, who died in '75); manager Danny Fields; the Asheton brothers' sister Kathy; occasional sax sideman Steve Mackay; and late-period bassist Mike Watt. Ron Asheton passed in 2009 and appears via archival interviews. Blessedly, there are no rock critics, musicians or movie stars to expound in an overly fawning, sycophantic fashion about the group's importance to them, rock music, or the development of western civilization in general. The recent Beatles tour documentary "Eight Days a Week" was very nearly sunk by the inclusion of Whoopi Goldberg telling us how her mother bought her a ticket to the Shea Stadium show. Her memories and opinions are no more important (or even germane) than those of the other 60,000 people who were there that night. She's a celeb talking head who added nothing but her ego to the proceedings. Here, the laser focus is on telling a story through those who were part of the story, to the exclusion of third-party opinions (and you know what opinions are like - everybody has one...)

An immense amount of audio and visual material is packed into the hour-and-three-quarter running time, as attested to by acknowledgments in the end credits. That it never seems overstuffed, hyperactive or rushed is a tribute to Jarmusch's sense of pacing.

I went in with limited expectations of a run-of-the-mill rock bio, at best (the choice of film was made by my wife, who's a major Iggy fan). I came out more than impressed by a well-constructed, tightly focused exercise in documentary filmmaking that would have been outstanding no matter the subject.