'Strummer' Illuminates the Man and Music

From Ty Burr, Boston Globe:

The Clash meant so much to so many people for so long that it's almost impossible to imagine how the group must have looked from the inside. They were a punk band with passion, politics, and - it seemed like a paradox at first - dignity; consequently, the usual tell-alls and reunions have never been their style.

So director Julien Temple has done it for them - or more specifically, the group's late figurehead and leader - in the bighearted generational bear hug of a movie "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten." Suffused with clear-eyed affection for its subject and times, this is not your little brother's punk documentary, patiently explaining who did what when. Rather, it's a gathering of the tribe to memorialize one of their own who was also one of our best.

The "gathering" is literal. Late in his life, Strummer was given to organizing impromptu campfires, utopian meetings of the mind to disseminate music and political thought. Temple honors that by filming most of his interviews around midnight campfires in New York, Los Angeles, and London. At first it feels like a filmmaker's annoying affectation (especially since none of the talking heads are ever identified), but the gimmick takes hold, and by the time we get to Bono, hair whipping in the wind and sparks as he speaks of how the Clash completely reoriented his teenage years, we've entered a very special place.

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