‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ Review: Nick Broomfield’s Dark and Sad Rock Doc About the Lost Boy of the Rolling Stones
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Rockism, in case you don’t know the term, is the school of thought that holds the noisy “purity” of rock ‘n’ roll to be morally and aesthetically superior to the “corruption” of pop.
There are numerous iconic examples of rockism. It was there in the postpunk ’80s hipsters who found the Replacements and Joy Division to be superior to Michael Jackson or Madonna.
It was there in the rock-crit establishment of the mid-2000s mounting its collective attack on Coldplay. And it was there, just last week, in The New York Times when Jeff Tweedy, the leader of Wilco, printed an excerpt from his new book in which he apologized, in a “My name is Jeff, and I’m a rockist” sort of way, for having trashed ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in his indie youth; what he now realizes, only 47 years after it was released, is that it’s a great song. (At this rate, Tweedy, who’s 56, will be ready to see the light about Lady Gaga around the time he’s in assisted living.) But judging from Nick Broomfield’s documentary “The Stones and Brian Jones” (opening Nov.
17), the seminal assertion of rockism may have come from deep inside the rock world itself. And that would be how Brian Jones, the founding member of the Rolling Stones, created the group in 1962; how he established it as a British-white-boy blues band (in the early days, the Stones would cover Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley and Willie Dixon); and how, after Mick Jagger and Keith Richards began to compose the songs that made the Stones famous, he turned on them for diluting what he thought was the group’s true mission: to remain a blues band.
Read more on variety.com
