Now that our classic rockers are getting old, much like presidents and prime ministers, they’re starting to think about their Legacy. They’re getting these film and video biographies that, in most cases, they’ve commissioned themselves. So sometimes it’s not so much a VH1 Behind the Music success, degradation and redemption storyline (some day I’m sure we’ll get “little Amy Winehouse had a hit, wouldn’t go to rehab, shoved a lot of shit in her veins, and now she’s cleaned up and very very sorry and recording dull duets with Celine Dion”). Sometimes it’s scrubbed so squeaky clean that it could be suitable for daytime TV programming.

Today’s case in point is Tom Petty. After thirty years at the top (a formidable achievement by any standard) and as a friend of Bob Dylan, he probably thought he needed his own No Direction Home (Martin Scorsese’s excellent documentary covering the early part of Dylan’s life and career). So he hired a movie director, but in his case got someone whose best work was 20 years ago and today is better known for making cameo appearances on The Sopranos - Peter Bogdanovich. This is not a surprising choice for a man who thinks that working with Stevie Nicks or Jeff Lynne is a classy move.

Anyway, the result is Runnin’ Down a Dream, possibly the most boring rock film ever made. Four hours of “well, we made this record then we went on that tour and then we made another record.” Petty, a dependable rocker, has never been one for making Grand Statements and, true to form, there’s nothing within this film that attempts to place anything he’s ever done within the context of anything other than Tom Petty.

Bogdanovich has certainly displayed plenty of visual style in the past, but this film consists of concert clips, rock video clips and talking heads barely registering any emotion. It doesn’t help that the Heartbreakers seem to be almost entirely lacking in the personality department. They’re so low key that they barely register. The most exciting story he’s able to drag out of Petty is about a time that drummer Stan Lynch didn’t want to show up for a charity gig so Petty threatened to replace him with Ringo Starr and then Lynch showed up. Yeah, that’s a real knee slapper.

Maybe the larger problem is that Tom Petty is simply a journeyman pop star. He’s never written a line with the immediacy or impact of, say, “My love is vengeance that’s never free.” That line was written, of course, by Pete Townshend. And while Runnin’ Down a Dream is clearly meant for Tom Petty fans only, Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who packs more than enough drama for ten films into its
two hours.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible to improve on The Kids Are Alright but Amazing Journey manages to do that by focusing in on the outsized personalities and by not shying away from the conflicts that constantly threatened to tear the band apart. There are these moments in some of the older interview clips where you can see just how much these guys absolutely detested each other at certain points, yet stayed together because they knew that individually they could never scale the same epic heights that they did as a band.
The thing is, these guys know how to tell a story. They’re animated, they’re emotional and they know how to play to an audience. I love the bit where Roger Daltrey is describing the first time that Keith Moon played with the band. “All of a sudden, it’s like a jet engine started up in the back of me.” And then there’s a montage that shows you exactly what he meant.

Amazing Journey is just two hours long. The first 90 minutes quite rightly focuses in on the band’s first 15 years, up through Keith Moon’s death, which in many ways tore the heart out of the band. That leaves just 30 minutes for the remaining 30 years of their career. And that’s the way it should be.

Of course, aside from documentaries there are the, for want of a better term, fictional bio-pics, coming back into style again thanks to the recent successes of Ray and Walk The Line. My favorite rock biopic remains The Buddy Holly Story, even though the “story” presented in that film bears about as much resemblance to the truth as any speech by George Bush. In the next few years, we’re going to be inundated with these.

But they’re going to have to work really hard to be better than Control, the British indie film that chronicles the short, tragic life of Ian Curtis. In case you don’t know, Ian Curtis was the lead singer and songwriter for the band Joy Division. In the late seventies they released two nearly-perfect albums and then Curtis, just 23 years old, hung himself. The rest of the group would continue onwards for the next two decades as New Order.

Control is the debut film from Anton Corbijn, one of the few noteworthy rock photographers and music video directors of the past 20 years, and is based on the autobiography written by Curtis’ widow. This low key film, shot in stark black and white, looks like the work of a still photographer – in most scenes images are carefully framed and the camera is locked down, yet in the end this low key approach is one of the reasons why the film is so emotionally devastating. It doesn’t hurt that the film includes participation from so many people who knew the man. Aside from Corbijn, Factory owner Tony Wilson is one of the producers, New Order provide the score and even Annik Honore, Curtis’s lover, consulted on the script.

A lot of the credit has to go to Sam Riley, playing Curtis, or perhaps channeling him would be the more proper term. Oddly enough, Riley played The Fall’s Mark E. Smith in 24 Hour Party People, a very different film chronicling the same era. The performance footage (all performed live by the actors, not lip synced) is astonishing. Samantha Morton, as Curtis’s put-upon wife, could well add a third Oscar nomination to her list of career achievements.

It goes without saying that this well-reviewed film will probably never screen in a Hong Kong theater. And Todd Haynes’ new film about Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, is not here either. The NY Times review says that this film “hurls a Molotov cocktail through the façade of the Hollywood biopic factory.” The reality is that there’s probably no market for a film about Bob Dylan in Hong Kong, no matter how good it may be. Until the DVD comes out, I’ll be listening to the splendid soundtrack album, on which the likes of Eddie Vedder, Sonic Youth, Sufjan Stevens and Willie Nelson deconstruct and reconstruct this amazing tower of song.