Slowhand plays his cards close
A clumsy biopic of the guitar legend loses touch with the music.
ERIC CLAPTON: LIFE IN 12 BARS directed by Lili Fini Zanuck
Unsurprisingly for a star of his vintage, Eric Clapton is no stranger to the rockumentary. He’s featured in some good ones, such as the study of his Cream bandmate, the barmy, brilliant drummer Ginger Baker ( Beware of Mr Baker), and Martin Scorsese’s Beatle retrospective ( George Harrison: Living in the Material World).
In Life in 12 Bars, Clapton finally gets a doco of his own. It’s by Lili Fini Zanuck, a Hollywood producer whose only previous film directing credit, the drug thriller Rush, featured a Clapton score and launched his 1992 hit Tears in Heaven.
Life in 12 Bars is an authorised affair but it does not lack for candour: the footage of the subject’s spectacularly messy 1970s
includes shots of him snorting cocaine off a knife and being drunk and belligerent before a booing audience.
We see the headlines from his infamous racist outburst on a Birmingham stage in 1976, and we watch him, a few years earlier, with Jimi Hendrix, doing his white-guy best to style himself like his counterpart.
But for all of its occasional frankness, Life in 12 Bars is still a clumsily executed portrait. It starts out engagingly enough, tracing the rise from gifted blues-obsessed teenage guitarist to 1960s British rock royalty. But the second half of the film – a big chunk of which is devoted to his pursuit of Pattie Boyd, who, inconveniently, was already the wife of his best mate Harrison – becomes a long trudge through Clapton’s life all the way to its post-rehab happy-ever-after ending.
That a self-flagellating Clapton is the film’s main narrator possibly doesn’t help. He’s a sombre storyteller in a movie which eschews talking heads in favour of narration voiced over archival and home-movie footage and photos.
Assembling that scrapbook into a film is an impressive feat of editing, though it frequently cheats. For example, scenes supposedly showing Clapton recording Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps with the Beatles are shots of him playing on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus concert film inserted into footage of White Album sessions from earlier in 1968.
Along the way, it also loses touch with Clapton’s music. He’s not up for discussing his output, and anything between the Boyd-inspired Layla in 1970 and Tears in Heaven, inspired by the 1991 death of his four-year-old son Conor, is pretty much ignored.
So it’s a less-than-definitive study of Clapton, the musician. Still, it’s a moderately absorbing story of Clapton, the rock’n’roll near-casualty. IN CINEMAS FROM FEBRUARY 12