Rolling Stone:

Life And Death Of Brian Jones

Dir: Danny Garcia

WIENERWORLD

Fullest story yet of the Stones’ founder.

It’s a brave man who tries breathing cinematic life into a story already told so many times in print (and rather appallingly as a biopic), but director Danny Garcia spent years putting together what he hopes will be the definitive film about the Stones’ tragic founder, genius and outlaw pioneer Brian Jones, foraging new angles, rare photos, unseen footage and top-level interviewees that only stop short of the Stones (and, unsurprisingly, their music).

Starting with Jones’s Cheltenham childhood and adolescence, the film’s intricate weave of visuals and voices gets under way with home-movie clips and school-friend interviews, before the Stones’ birth (leaving no doubt who formed them) and early days are enhanced by the voices of Alexis Korner and ‘sixth Stone’ Ian Stewart, joined in person by original member Dick Taylor, French girlfriend Zouzou, NME writer Keith Altham and best mate/partner-inmischief Prince Stash Klossowski, still cool and exotic in his late 70s.

The Stones’ rise and Jones’s diminishing influence on the JaggerRichards-Oldham axis (that fiver a week again), along with an unpredictable personality that would today be diagnosed as bipolar, witnessed by photographer Gered Mankowitz, Chris

Farlowe and Phil May, whose story about Jones’s violent vinyl-trashing reaction to some stoned Pretty Things inadvertently giggling as a Stones track plays on the record player may be amusing but illustrates his burgeoning paranoia and instability.

The establishment’s vicious witchhunt and losing Anita Pallenberg (“the only girl he really loved,” according to his dad) exacerbates Jones’s drug-driven demise, balanced by Stash highlighting his vulnerability, sensitivity and “devilish” insight. Former Stones tour manager Sam Cutler contributes too, describing Jones’s final, tormented stretch in the band he formed before they sacked him.

Trying to recount such an incredible life in the film’s first hour inevitably means much is left out but, brushing aside conspiracy theories, the final 40 minutes focus on investigative journalist Scott Jones’s chilling evidence that Jones was murdered by builder Frank Thorogood.

The full story of this complex, often contradictory individual – essentially the world’s first rock star – will probably never be told but, despite obstacles and restrictions, Garcia comes very close. ■■■■■■■■■■