The opening 20 minutes or so of “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” is like being in a fight on a bouncy castle; exhilarating, exhausting and leaving you with a dickie tum. The biopic of “Pop Laureate” and Blockheads front man Ian Dury is as chaotic as his bohemian lifestyle, but boy does it shake you out of those January blues.
Director Mat Whitecross has previously tackled “Disaster Capitalism” in “The Shock Doctrine,” the idea that neo liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance. The same could be applied to Andy Serkis’ demonic performance as Dury. He’s a one-man catastrophe exerting his authority over his family and friends by a hurricane of abuse, razorblade wit and vulnerability.
He researched Dury for 3 years. He recorded his songs with “The Blockheads” and mastered his “Mockney” accent. Serkis even trained just one side of his body to replicate Dury’s distinctive lurching gait acquired after he contracted polio in Southend-On-Sea as a child. Surely Serkis is nailed on to win the Leading Actor Bafta with only Jeremy Renner pushing him close for his performance in “The Hurt Locker.”
To keep up with Serkis, Whitecross pings the camera about as if it were attached to a bungee cord zipping from one scene to another. Some wildly ingenious editing never threatens to derail the movie as the script wisely clings to the central relationship between Dury and his son Baxter. Bullied at school for being “Posh,” Baxter reveals a set of hideous bruises. “Are we?” he asks a stunned Dury who replies, “No, we’re arts and crafts.”
Baxter, like his father, is conflicted. Where does he fit in? Dury, the son of a chauffer and a university lecturer, benefited from the post-war drive to get working class kids into university. Taught by the artist Peter Blake who also did the fantastic credit sequence and the “Blockheads” montage, Dury was a wonderfully dark mix of music hall, East End villainy and a classical education. This diverse background coupled with his genius for language made him a true English eccentric.
This doesn’t help you if you’re a young lad trying to fit in. Bounced from pillar to post like a pinball machine, Baxter is a boy searching for identity. Who should he identify with? The mad collection of adults that inhabit his kitchen and living room or the kids at school who hate him? His fun dad is dangerously irresponsible, leaving him in the care of “The Sulphate Strangler,” a bodyguard deemed trustworthy because he was a roadie for Led Zeppelin, which almost leads to tragic events.
His artistic, well-meaning mum is little better. She indulges Dury like a child accepting his atrocious behaviour whilst continuing to allow Baxter to stay with him, despite the nightly debauchery exploding in the delightfully named “Catshit Mansions.” Dury’s lover Denise is actually the most responsible figure in Baxter’s life. “My weakness is loving him,” she says of Dury, but despite this she seems to see through his barbed existence and the harm it is inflicting on his son.
The canker in Dury’s soul is twofold: his appalling rehabilitation as a kid from polio at the hands of a Dickensian hospital and his relationship with his largely absent father (who appears in a powerful cameo by Ray Winstone). Whitecross films the young Dury’s scenes with a steely blue sheen, austere and remote as befitting an institution whose motto grimly reads, “Men Made Here.” He is bullied and cajoled, humiliated when he soils himself in front of a whole dormitory of lads to the screams of “Shitter!”
His father, like most working class dads, is a mythic figure emerging from his minds eye as a movie star. Picked up in a Rolls Royce, Dury remembers his dad’s distinct breathing as he carries him back to hospital from a day at a lake teaching him how to box. Later, in a rare quiet moment, Dury goes to his dad’s pokey bed-sit and sees the reality, a pair of shoes neatly by the bed and a set false teeth in a glass of water. This is the sum total of a lif, and one Dury himself seemed destined to emulate, if he continued to self-destruct.
But for all the melancholy, self-loathing and darkness, “Sex & Drugs & Rock And Roll” is a celebration of some glorious music and a vastly talented group who were complete a one off. Just listen to the funk of “Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3” or the defiant fury of “Spasticus Autisticus,” his two-fingered salute to the patronising “International Year of Disabled Persons,” to be sure of their place amongst the greatest English acts of all time.
Serkis summons up Dury’s entire unhinged stage persona-could Oscar success follow his Bafta nomination? The rest of the cast are uniformly excellent, especially Bill Milner as Baxter and the Naomie Harris as Denise whilst Whitecross is a director to watch closely.
In the words of the man himself, “I’m not here to be remembered, I’m here to be alive!” This film does his wish justice.