Few bands have had their status and intent more comprehensively inflated than The Doors, the sixties quartet who’ve inspired as many fatuous claims as they’ve sold albums: 80 million or so. They were, starting from 1965, a seditious pop band, practitioners of the overwrought and the baroque and finally sturdy bluesmen, but the serious deification rests with frontman Jim Morrison, who died in 1971, whose generational status obscured his sometimes self-destructive buffoonery.
To the credit of independent filmmaker Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Delirious), his documentary When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors is quietly respectful, not reverent; the term 'shaman" is heard only once, and Morrison’s public persona is described, via Johnny Depp’s circumspect narration, as 'brilliant, or brilliantly calculated for effect".
Being a Doors talking head is a crowded profession, with some former band members leading the way, but DiCillo works only from a rich collection of archival footage that obliquely suggests that one of the band’s problems was that they were constantly being filmed. Without falling into procedural excess, DiCillo nonetheless pursues a line of demystification of the Los Angeles quartet’s career via comparatively straightforward linear narrative – this is why the riot started, that is why Morrison was arrested.
You see early rehearsals, are introduced to worthwhile facts (Morrison was the son of an admiral, guitarist Robby Krieger wrote many of their hit singles) and can sense that The Doors fed off the social upheaval of the era without giving it a voice. Morrison was a full blown alcoholic, whose live performances grew increasingly ugly, and DiCillo thankfully acknowledges the good with the bad, showing how the first true generation of rock stars played with cops prowling the stage amid chaos contemporary music fans wouldn’t recognise. When You’re Strange is a welcome antidote to Oliver Stone’s dreadful biopic.
