Nebulon seldom has time for your earth music, to his mighty warrior ears it sounds like the pitiful whining of a doomed race, especially when compared to an Alpha Centuri battle march. Although the music of Ian Drury has yet to come up in my research into your pitiful planet, I found this movie a deeply witty and engrossing biopic with some nice touches which thoroughly won over the heart of this might space faring warrior.
Ian Drury was attacked by the Polio virus in his youth and grew up to be a kind of dilettante artist with musical aspirations. The film very much steers away from the music though and instead focuses on Drury’s troubled home life and relationship estranged wife, son and daughter. Interposed with this story are flashbacks to institutionalisation during his childhood and a particularly evil guard played by Toby Jones. The central thesis is that Drury’s behaviour can be explained away as a response to this difficult upbringing.
Serkis makes for a great Ian Drury, delivering witticisms with aplomb and holding his own through the more touching and intimate scenes in a way that you might not expect from the man who crafter both Gollum and King Kong.
If there are any criticisms of this film, it is that at times it seems to lack direction which s a problem that is common to many musical biopic. Human lives it seems do not fir into a conventional narrative structure particularly well. Where as movies such as walk the line try to get round this by couching the story in terms of the songs we know such as Ring of Fire and the live recording at Folsom, using these performances as crescendos, this film adopts a much more character centric approach with the denouement being Drury’s own reconciliation with the past, although this does feature a performance of his disabled anthem Spaticus Autisticus. Overall though the music takes a back seat to what is going on in Drury’s head.
Despite being sparsely used, the gig sequences are amazing, and Nebulon for one thinks that the staging may give them even greater impact than the original performances, certainly the recorded ones on YouTube.
So, even if you don’t know, or particularly want to know anything about Ian Drury and the Blockheads, this is a great film with great performances and outstanding music. Go see.
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