Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is about a punk icon, but the documentary has a quietness about it that isn’t out of place given the impenetrability of its subject.

Naturally, there are times when the quiet is punctured by songs like “London Calling” and “Rock the Casbah”. Using home movies, footage from films such as Animal Farm and interviews with associates of Strummer, director Julien Temple offers a fascinating picture of a man who seems not to have stopped posturing until the last years of his life. Temple’s film charts the former frontman of The Clash’s days as the child of a diplomat, a boarding school student who soon discovered that it was a case of bully or be bullied, and a punk who readily discarded the friends and colleagues he’d made when he was a hippy. Temple, who was also responsible for The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, can’t be accused of creating a hagiography because there’s times when Strummer comes across as a real prick (e.g. when he’s seen berating an interviewer or when a bandmate talks about the night Strummer slept with his wife). Perhaps the suicide of his pathologically reserved brother indicated to Strummer that only the loud and belligerent survive. While the music in the section about The Clash’s career is fantastic, the unoriginality of a band disintegrating due to drugs and outsized egos makes this part of the movie less interesting than the examination of Strummer’s search for a niche post-Clash. During this period he appears to have become a softer and more rounded human being, and a happier one. In constructing his portrait, Temple has assembled Bono, Johnny Depp, Courtney Love and a plethora of friends, lovers and contemporaries, including a still stoned Mick Jones. Strummer’s serene voice is intermittently heard via snippets of the music show he presented during the 1990s on the BBC World Service. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is a fine film about a flawed man. Incidentally, one of the trailers featured prior to the screening of the movie was for Control, an account of the life of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.