Iggy and the Stooges
“GIMME DANGER” My rating: B
108 minutes | MPAA rating: R
More people have heard of Iggy and the Stooges than have actually heard Iggy and the Stooges.
“Gimme Danger” isn’t going to change that.
Jim Jarmusch’s documentary about “the greatest rock’n’roll band ever” is basically a missive from one fan to other fans.
No scholarly analyses. No pontificating critics. Not much historic perspective.
It’s not encyclopedic, it’s not a primer. Jarmusch assumes that if you’re watching it’s because you’re already one of the converted.
Still, “Gimme Shelter” has lots of performance footage which, as much as 50 years after the fact, still has the power to amaze.
A lot of music fans (this writer among them) will tell you that on record the Stooges were…primal, anarchistic and sometimes unlistenable.
But in concert they were fueled by the hypnotizing antics of Iggy (aka Jim Osterberg), the wirey, muscled lead singer who pranced shirtless through every performance, undulating like a cobra, diving head-first into the audience. Think a naked Mick Jagger on speedballs.
Iggy Pop today
Though other Stooges, living and dead, are represented in brief talking-head or voiceover moments, the film focuses mostly on Iggy/Osterberg, who seems to have picked up some wisdom in his near 70 years but lost none of his countercultural attitude.
He speaks plainly — no moralizing — about dark years of heroin use and near homelessness.
Osterberg is proud that whatever their personal demons, the Stooges never gave in to the corporate interests of the music machine. The whole ’60s peace/love music movement, he claims, was created in recording industry business meetings.
Late in the film Jarmusch comes close to putting the whole Stooges thing in context with a montage of bands that were directly influenced by Iggy and Co.: the Sex Pistols, The Damned, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks.
But the Stooges were the originals.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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