Film

Slashing out chords and spitting up politics, Joe Strummer lent the Clash its glower and gravity, leaving the romance to others. Not that there wasn’t any art to his yowl on “I’m So Bored with the USA” or “Rock the Casbah.” But if the band struggled (way too briefly) with the mantle of being the world’s most important, it was because of Strummer’s ferocity, not love songs like “Train in Vain.”

Julien Temple, a punk survivor and one of the most effortlessly cool filmmakers, has fashioned a loving profile, assembled with a roving eye. Strummer’s exotic upbringing as the son of a diplomat stationed in Turkey is crosscut with belly dancers; his English boarding-school troubles chafe with if.… By the time we get around to that chilly London warehouse and the band, we know this man: bully and big brother, hippie and thug, fearless and alone.

The fun, hyperactive montage is often narrated by the late frontman himself (he died in 2002, leaving behind a trove of radio recordings and doodles). More provocative are the testimonies of folks like Bono and Johnny Depp gathered around a bonfire, a Strummer pastime. Temple chooses not to identify any of them, as if to say, “He was Joe Strummer, and we’re nothing.”
He may have a point.