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Stoned (2005)

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From Time Out London

Producer Stephen Woolley (‘The End of the Affair’, ‘Michael Collins’) makes his directing debut with this kaleidoscopic psychodrama about Brian Jones. A founding member of The Rolling Stones, Jones drowned in his swimming pool in 1969 at the age of 27. Tracing Jones’s troubled path from rebellious middle-class teen to sacked band member, ‘Stoned’ also attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding his premature death. This is, however, no traditional pop biopic.

A gifted musician who couldn’t be arsed, Jones (Leo Gregory) slid into drink and drug-fuelled decadence and ill-fated solo projects. He was also ‘a gifted wind-up artist’, who delighted in testing his friends and acquaintances to breaking point. His latest victim is jobbing builder Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), with whom Jones has a volatile yet almost symbiotic relationship. The cinematic touchstones for ‘Stoned’ are Joseph Losey’s ‘The Servant’ and Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s ‘Performance’, the former for its Harold Pinter-scripted power struggle between master and servant, the latter for its fractured time scheme, psychedelic images and bi-curious sexuality.

A 12-year gestation period unearthed an abundance of source material, but the talented scriptwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (‘Let Him Have It’, ‘Die Another Day’) don’t always cut through to the spine of the story. Despite a distracting blond wig, Leo Gregory (‘Green Street’) captures Jones’s louche, ambiguous appeal, and Woolley never shies away from the musician’s darker, more (self-) destructive side. Most successfully though, ‘Stoned’ evokes the sounds, sartorial excesses and psychedelia of the early ’60s, when the austerity and conformism of the postwar years gave way to the hedonism and anti-establishment iconoclasm of the Swinging ’60s.

Author: NF

Time Out London Issue 1839: November 16-23 2005

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