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Visit the Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten Web site

So, if you could know pretty much everything, good and bad about your idol, would you? Really think about it. If you love the music of someone so much, would you really want to jeopardize the context it has in your life by learning about every aspect of their life? Would you want to find out that, in the end, they were that different from you, somewhat far from their rock-god status. I would say a fair amount of people would; for this reason, among others, I and hundreds of other patrons packed the house in San Francisco’s Lumiere Landmark Theater to check out rock-doc director Julian Temple’s newest offering, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. This 2-hour romp through the life of Clash front man Joe Strummer, is tragically honest, a bit awkward at times, but overall an excellent piece of filmmaking and homage to the late-great Strummer.

Temple gives Strummer’s life story his standard art house, animated treatment. The film’s interviews are set around a broadcast of Strummer’s London Calling radio show: allowing Strummer himself to dictate most of the film’s diverse music. Each interview takes place around a group of Strummer’s friends and family all over the world listening to said broadcast around a bonfire: a symbol we later find may well have been Strummer’s idea of heaven. While some of these diverse interviews, particularly with Strummer’s former art school and public school mates and of course, his Clash and Mescaleros band members, offer an abundance of humanity, dynamism, emotional severity and sincerity to the legacy of Joe Strummer. On the other hand, some interviews are very, how do I say this, weird to watch. Most notably Johnny Depp in one of the most fuck-awkward interviews ever. Myself and the rest of the audience could not really get over the fact that Depp is trying to be serious in recounting why Strummer is so influential whilst dawning his Jack Sparrow make up, fresh off a shoot from Pirates. It was like wearing a tuxedo shirt to your grandpa’s funeral, I actually couldn’t hear what he was saying over the laughter of the theater house. (Another notable awkward interview belonged to Courtney Love, who again had to prove to everyone how down she is by being the only person on camera to shed visible tears whilst recounting a time when she stayed at Joe Strummer’s house or something. I couldn’t hear her words too well over the audience collectively gagging.)

Temple’s archive footage is again exceptional digging deep into the Strummer family/ Clash past to make his case on the punk rock world versus Joe Strummer. The front man’s dual history as a boarding school boy/art school drop out visually comes into clash (no pun intended) with his hyper punk persona which was to dominate and define most of his public life. Hearing the art school friends of Woody (Joe’s, who is really named John, nickname in art school) talk about how one day they weren’t punk enough to hang with Strummer makes the audience call into question why he went the route of punk. Why he chose such a, at least in the beginning, harsh life, and what the success of all of that meant. All-in-all this man was confusing, and the film’s 2-hour running time focuses heavily on Strummer dealing with these dual personalities and the conflict he encountered daily because of them (particularly when the Clash was reaching unimaginable success on both sides of the pond). This fuel’s one of the film’s saddest points when a documentary filmmaker captured Strummer in the studio racking his brain to insanity to try in an attempt to create a post-Clash hit. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.

The film remedies this tragedy by showing Strummer finding his true, harmonized self (a mixture of his hippy, art school roots and activist punk persona) in his latter diverse musical efforts and in his family and friends. His death is briefly, but beautifully and respectfully covered by Temple, but the film speaks to the truer reality of Strummer: the fact that all of these people, young and old, famous and not-so-famous, all over the world were influenced by the music and goals of this man’s life. Even if these moments were all not perfect, they had a profound impact on the planet earth and this, Temple shows us, was the man called Joe Strummer, Woody and John.