THE STORY – Punk rocker Billy Idol’s journey from underground star to pop icon unfolds in a documentary chronicling his fame, drug struggles, and powerful return to music.
THE CAST – Billy Idol
THE TEAM – Jonas Åkerlund (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 118 Minutes
The first person who speaks to the audience in Jonas Åkerlund’s new documentary “Billy Idol Should Be Dead” isn’t the rock star himself. After an opening scene of the now-69-year-old working with collaborators on a new song, the film properly begins with Brendan Bourke, who managed Idol when he first came to New York City with Chrysalis Records. It’s a low-key bold move to start your musician bio-documentary with an unknown name, but Åkerlund’s actually putting his best foot forward; later in the film, Bourke reveals that the reason why you probably don’t know his name is that Idol’s father, in a desperate bid to save his son from yet another drug overdose, removed Bourke from his duties and made him sign an NDA. This is the first time Bourke has spoken publicly about his relationship with Idol since the 1980s. It may be a generic musician bio-doc, but whatever “Billy Idol Should Be Dead” lacks in terms of innovation or excitement, it more than makes up for with all the never-before-seen footage and never-before-heard stories it features.
What little style the film does have goes a long way toward capturing the essence of Idol’s glory days as a musician. Åkerlund, a music video veteran, knows how to grab an audience’s attention, and he keeps things moving fast and furious to approximate the rush of Idol’s rise to fame and drug-fueled superstardom. The singer’s most drugged-out moments (like passing out in the middle of a hotel elevator door in front of Mel Gibson and his family) are recreated in animated sequences that wouldn’t have been out of place in Idol’s ’80s music videos, adding a hallucinatory quality that further places the audience inside Idol’s headspace at the time. When former bandmates and friends talk about the “monster” Idol would turn into when he got high enough, we see the animated Idol turn into a Godzilla-like creature capable of destroying buildings with a wave of its arm. This gets supplemented by a treasure trove of archival material, including home videos, behind-the-scenes footage, and long-forgotten TV appearances, all of which paint as complete a portrait as possible of Idol’s heyday as a king of rock & roll.
While fun, all this style ultimately doesn’t mean much if the actual content of the film isn’t up to snuff. Thankfully, Åkerlund has gotten a treasure trove of talking heads. Some make only one brief appearance, but they’re all gold, whether it’s Miley Cyrus waxing poetic about how sexy Idol’s old performances still are or the legendary Nile Rodgers relaying a story about how Idol vomited mid-sentence before introducing him to David Bowie at a club.
Where the film really shines, though, is when it focuses on family. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is how wholesome Idol really is. Growing up middle-class caused him some trouble in his early days in the punk scene, as he and his Generation X bandmates were looked down upon by the mostly working-class scene members for being wealthy and perceived as “pretty boys.” But his parents had such strong values that his father, William, dropped everything to fly to New York and take over Idol’s business management when it was clear that his son was losing his mind to drugs. He may have overreacted (according to Idol, he thought everyone in the music business was a drug dealer), but he also showed up for his son when it mattered. Watching Idol interact with his mother as they reminisce about his early years is all the more heartwarming for how out of place it is to see the infamously badass “Rebel Yell” singer, still sporting his iconic spiked hair and leather jackets, speak quietly and exchange warm hugs with an elderly British lady. Idol’s vulnerability, not just when talking about his worst experiences with drugs but when talking about his family, feels refreshing in large part because of how unexpected it feels coming from the man with the most famous snarl in music. These scenes feel revelatory, providing something genuinely new after the fun, if not exactly groundbreaking, look at rock star drug abuse.
The film’s ending would have a larger emotional impact if Åkerlund and his team of editors had gone for a more straightforward structure. Idol is a charismatic, engaging storyteller, but the film hops around back and forth in time so much that it’s almost dizzying. The attempt to organize the story thematically makes sense, but it doesn’t work because of how tangled the chronology becomes. After a speed-through of Idol’s rise, we flashback to his youth in Bromley and go through everything more slowly, then double back again to talk about his earlier childhood in America when Idol starts talking about his dad more in-depth, and on and on, like this. This ends up making some thematic throughlines harder to track, especially since the film isn’t as closely structured around Idol’s cat-like ability to survive as its title would have you believe. At least if the film was organized around Idol’s overdoses, there would be the opportunity to explore different reasons why Idol became addicted to drugs and why he decided to stop using them. However, the film barely does anything with the giant contradiction at its center that sees multiple people blaming the pressure to be Billy Idol on his drug use while Idol himself maintains that he was just going where the scene was going at the time. No, the theme of Idol’s drug use and many brushes with death are just there to give this otherwise basic documentary more of a unique focus. It works since Idol is so inherently watchable, but such is the way of most musician bio-documentaries. “Billy Idol Should Be Dead” at least makes the most that it can out of the tried-and-true genre formula.
