The best biographies, whether in print or on film, are about so much more than their human subject. They’re examinations of the times and social milieu that supported them, bringing to life a way of life since forgotten or – as in this case – not even well-known at the time.
To the uninitiated, and you can count this reviewer, the late Australian rock journalist Lillian Roxon might initially seem an unpromising subject for a documentary. Roxon is best known for her trailblazing 1969 Encyclopedia of Rock, published when few were taking rock seriously or saw that it could have social significance and lasting value, but Paul Clarke’s film quickly establishes that she was so much more.
This includes her being a key early feminist, not so much for anything she wrote as for the way she lived her life. Roxon emerges as an inspiration and confidante to Germaine Greer, who dedicated The Female Eunuch to her, and a well-known figure in the Sydney Push, the bohemian movement of the ’50s, before moving to New York and becoming the female equivalent of the more heavily mythologised Lester Bangs. She was, in other words, an influential figure who championed the underground spirit of the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop while the mainstream was busy co-opting their peers and turning rock into a readily saleable lifestyle commodity.
A subject as colorful as Roxon deserves something a little wilder than this very conventionally made talking heads doco, but the heads are both famous and fascinating: Greer, Pop, Alice Cooper, David Malouf, Helen Reddy and Richard Neville are among the luminaries paying tribute to Roxon’s larger-than-life personality (heard on recordings but sadly glimpsed in too few film clips). In the process they paint a vivid portrait of a scene that was challenging norms in often outlandish ways. It was centered on Andy Warhol’s Factory and the backroom of the club Max’s Kansas City, the latter a place where, as Cooper recalls, you might walk in and see Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Zappa and Salvador Dali all at different tables.
While Roxon hung out with, and waved the flag for Cooper and David Bowie before they became stars, much of this music would only receive its proper due with the punk movement that followed several years on from Roxon’s 1973 death from causes that remain frustratingly unclear.
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