Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What’s the darkest moment you’ve ever seen in a rock ‘n’ roll documentary? Up until now, I’d have said the answer was obvious: the sequence in “Gimme Shelter” where Meredith Hunter, in his lime-green suit, rushes the stage at Altamont with a gun in his hand and gets stabbed in the back, half a dozen times, by a member of the Hell’s Angels.
For pure heart of darkness, what could top that? But I’ve just seen “Anita,” Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom’s very good documentary about Anita Pallenberg — beautiful and imperious scenester of the ’60s and ’70s, Hollywood actress and icon of scruffy-chic rock royalty, wife of Keith Richards, muse to several of the other Rolling Stones.
And there’s a moment in it that made me suck in my breath in shock and horror as much as “Gimme Shelter” does. The year is 1976.
Keith and Anita have been living as a slovenly, decadent version of a domestic family unit. We’re heard their lives described, with disarming honesty, by Anita, whose words are taken from the manuscript of “Black Magic,” an autobiography she wrote but never published. (It’s read as narration by Scarlett Johansson.) Keith and Anita’s son, Marlon Leon Sundeep, is 6 years old (his two middle names carry the initials “LSD,” à la “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”).
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