For most of its running time, this documentary, a not quite bio of notorious rocker Ozzy Osbourne, is a 'laughs and gasps’ celebration of a certain kind of rock 'n’ roll celebrity lifestyle. This is despite the fact that there are quite a few survivors (or should that be casualties?) on hand here to bear witness to the lifestyle’s excesses, cerebral blind spots and spiritual dead ends.
For every bit here where Osbourne declaims the cost of too many drugs of whatever kind, on his relationship, his body and music, there is an anecdote that seems designed to elicit a 'f**k yeah’ response from fellow travellers everywhere, which ends up a ringing endorsement of the rock myth. You know, the one about how rock (at least in the late '60s thru to its early '80s incarnation) was a monument to rebellion, anarchy, and liberty. So here is the young Ozzy biting the heads off bats (that was an accident he says now), taking his clothes off at every opportunity and playing 'dark’ heavy metal music with pseudo sinister lyrics.
There’s archival material included to support the premise that at one time, Osbourne and his band, Black Sabbath, were platinum monsters with a look and sound that was unique and by pop standards definitely bizarre. (Paul McCartney is on hand here to give the band a ringing endorsement.) But as counterpoint to all this stuff, the filmmakers get into the irony of rebel rock: the fact that Ozzy and his cohorts (and hundreds like them) never saw any real money (and never knew the true state of their finances); that any semblance of emotional intimacy and domesticity was impossible between road-life, toxic lifestyle choices and band commitments.
Still, this isn’t really a 'music film’, a fact that some music fans (like this writer) might find mystifying. There’s absolutely nothing here about what makes heavy metal heavy metal (musically speaking) and almost no discussion about music and lyric content (aside from McCartney’s). This at first does not seem such a curious or serious omission; that is, until after the movie is over, when you suddenly realise that the portrait of rock’s most maligned figure has been reduced to the same old boring tabloid-like long-haired-rock-lout image.
This film’s central tactic – call it the 'God, we had a blast, but we’re all grown up now" – is finally shallow and more than a little dishonest. The film, though, doesn’t spend too much time looking back in the conventional we-did-this, then-we-did-that chronological structure; the spine of the piece is a portrait of Ozzy on a recent world concert tour. We see a few brief snippets from these shows – like Ozzy straining on the notes and using a prompt so he doesn’t have to remember the words – but most of the footage is dedicated to the minutiae of life on the road as a sixty something member of rock royalty. Here’s the once crazy and undisciplined Ozzy, living a drug-free life and sticking to a healthy diet and exercise regime.
The film’s best moments are when Ozzy admits to fatigue; his vulnerability is a reminder that he is a showbiz veteran, and that the distance to the stage is growing with each passing year. Between Ozzy’s past glories and the current concert slog, his old friends and children are on hand to declare that Ozzy was a lousy pal and poor father. His wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, offers some amateur psych couch assessments to the effect that low esteem lays at the core of Osbourne’s erratic, addictive, sometimes violent personality. But Ozzy emerges as a rather sympathetic figure; he seems a man out of his depth, a guy struggling to find words for emotions he doesn’t understand. The movie’s best scene has a story involving Ozzy in church, after a personal tragedy; it’s told like it’s in some way incongruous for this rock god to do such a thing. But despite the image, Osbourne seems like a very conventional lad, with small and human aspirations. From the start he comes off as both traditional and conservative.
One of the best things about the film is the way it taps into the cultural realities of why someone like Osbourne, a kid from a poor London neighborhood, got into rock into the first place – he wasn’t up for much else. It was a way of breaking out of a sad cycle of poverty and scraps of pleasure; but success, as the film would have it, was his curse.
It’s this mix of celebrating decadence and sanctimoniousness that makes the film a bit of a mess. It’s only toward the end that you get a real sense as to why the movie was made; the film pretty much condemns the Ozzy 'image’ pushed by the Osbourne’s TV show. Now, God Bless"¦ says Ozzy is clean and sober. Or to put it another way, this movie is the tale of a recovering addict. Produced by Jack, Ozzy’s son, the project has a poignancy that it doesn’t have as a movie experience: you get the feeling that Jack didn’t want his dad’s rock and MTV legacy to be his epitaph.
