Was Morrissey really this boring?
It takes a special kind of biopic to reduce its subject to the least imaginably interesting version of itself. Morrissey’s teenage years in Seventies Manchester, per England Is Mine, were a glum time of creative block and much staring at wallpaper, before he waited for the planets to align and the right collaborator – Johnny Marr – to eventually get The Smiths together.
Steven, as he was known back then, is the product of an unhappy home life and a restless malcontent: almost any random verse from a Smiths song could tell us this. The film is unauthorised – sans songs, in other words – and brings us only to the threshold of him discovering how to express himself, the exact point at which his existence transcended all this noodling drudgery and gave him a voice worth heeding.
Jack Lowden is unrecognisable in the role from the dashing RAF pilot he plays in Dunkirk, which is just as well. But he’s also unrecognisable as Morrissey, which is more of a hindrance. He’s a good actor trapped in the wrong part. Steven’s relentless despondency, and habit of alienating anyone who gets close, ought to be fiercely funny, but the script – dourly matter-of-fact – never offers these chances.
If Mancunian director Mark Gill has made one firm creative decision, it’s that his protagonist is rather like one of Stanley Kubrick’s hollow men, adrift and alienated. His method of showing this is to whip out the Kubrick copybook at all times. The opening shot of A Clockwork Orange is exactly imitated at a house party: Morrissey’s a droog. He pushes files down the corridor of his purgatorial office at the Inland Revenue, hunched just like Jack Torrance in The Shining, with the Shostakovich cue from Eyes Wide Shut sarcastically overlaid. He sits at his typewriter facing a blank page: all work and no play, see?
The effect of all this dogged homage is deadening, not illuminating. Katherine Pierce puts up a bit of a fight as the friend Steven dumps in favour of punky artist Linder (Jessica Brown Findlay). But there’s no one else for us to cling to in Gill’s portrait, and this particular Morrissey becomes terrible company, fast.
Was he really this dull? The film romanticises the ambitions hatched in bedrooms and gives the embarrassing impression that’s where all sincere art springs from. It’s such a constricted vision of growing up, it could barely inspire you to do anything, except not listen to Morrissey.