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Brian Gibson, whose previous music movies include the 1980 New Wave cult hit Breaking Glass and the Oscar-nominated Tina Turner biopic What's Love Got To Do With It, neatly skewers 70s glam-metal in his latest film Still Crazy. It's the story of a generic, overwrought, Deep Purplish group whose fate is described by their roadie Hughie (Billy Connelly) thusly: "For most rock bands, the pursuit of wisdom is a low priority compared to fame, fortune, and fornication. Such a band was Strange Fruit."
Two decades after their contentious onstage breakup during a lightning-punctuated festival appearance in the late 70s, the Fruits keyboard player Tony (Stephen Rea), now relegated to stocking restroom condom dispensers, has a chance meeting with the son of the promoter for that ill-fated show, who is putting on a 20th anniversary event. Thinking enough time has passed for some healing to have occurred, Tony contacts his former bandmates: the drummer, Beano (Secrets and Lies' Timothy Spall), works at a greenhouse nursery when he's not fleeing creditors, and lives in a trailer in his mother's yard; Les (Jimmy Nail, from Evita), runs a small roofing company; Karen (Juliet Aubrey), the band's tour manager and former girlfriend to their now-deceased, mercurial guitar icon Brian, handles marketing and p.r. for a big resort hotel. Only lead singer Ray (Bill Nighy), whose unfortunate comparisons to his predecessor (Brian's brother, who preceded him in drug-induced death) were a constant source of interpersonal vitriol and teeth-bashing, has stayed in the music business...after a fashion, producing a few poorly selling solo albums firmly rooted in Fruit's hopelessly dated, paleolithic idiom. But they all decide it might be fun both to play and have a little money again, so they recruit a guitar-slinging prodigy young enough to be their collective grandson, and rent an old Psychedelic Furs tour bus for a shakedown raid of little clubs on the continent prior to the big festival reunion. After a shaky start -- really shaky, like 8.5 on the Richter Scale of Apathetic Ineptitude -- they slip into a groove again, and even begin working on some new material. They also stir up the same old rivalries, and a few new ones, putting them right back in the same rut that drove them to forsake rock for reality in the first place. But there are a couple fresh surprises along the way to keep things interesting, and as somebody else once said, "Rock and roll's not dead, it just smells bad," so it's up to fate, the weather, and a combination of boomer nostalgia and GenY naivete to determine if they'll make the big show or not.
Though it occasionally paints with too-broad strokes, Still Crazy works as a slightly more serious companion piece to Spinal Tap, which so reverently managed both to lampoon and celebrate this brand of self-important pseudo-mystical arena rock, thanks to the ensemble cast. Except for Stephen Rea, undoubtedly the best-known of the bunch but who seems a little too well-adjusted, they all look and act just the way you'd expect aging Uriah Heep or Black Sabbath to carry on. Especially poignant is Billy Nighy's turn as the fragile, insecure Ray -- now a creature of AA, thinning hair, vitamins, torn cartilage, Eastern religion, organic food, and peptic ulcers -- who before each show stands in front of the men's room mirror like Boogie Nights' Dirk Diggler trying to summon the courage to perform.
Hughie sums it all up in a statement that also applies pretty well to Summer of Sam, "I think God got sick of all that 70s excess; that's why he created the Sex Pistols. B
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