Well Deserved Praise

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Not the worst biopic I've seen the past few years. Something for the fans of films like The Boat That Rocked, Good Vibrations and CBGB, although it's absolutely not as good as Richard Curtis' tribute to the pirate radio's of the 1960s. If you're into Ian Dury and The Blockheads Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is something you might enjoy. Especially Andy Serkis' performance as Ian Dury, which is spellbinding at certain times. But as with so many biopics, this one also suffers from boring flashbacks, sentimental nostalgia and lack of its own style. The scenes on stage, when Ian is talking to his audience (and the viewers), are probably the only ones that really honour Dury's persona and kookiness. Everything else is conventional cinema accompanied by an awesome punk / new wave soundtrack by The Blockheads.

In one scene Olivia Williams (as Dury's wife) throws plates at Andy Serkis(Dury) in a domestic argument - typically of this film it seemed stilted and unreal. That said Andy Serkis is terrific as Dury, as I expected. Naomi Harris is hot and a damned good actress to boot. The style of the film rather gets in the way of a coherent narrative and is ultimately unsatisfying. The Blockhead's music is always worth hearing and I would have liked more band performance on screen as that is what made Dury great. It is to the movie's credit that Ian Dury is seen warts and all, like most rock stars he was a complex and difficult man at the best of times. This film was not quite what I expected it to be and therefore overall I was disappointed in the final result.

The Ian Dury story was definitely too strange for fiction. A disabled pop star - in the modern video age - who created a mix of musical hall, punk and pub rock that topped Euro charts and still gets a whirl now and then on nostalgia radio.But is this is the real story? For a start he had one of the great backing bands (and to be frank they were more musical than him!) and, besides that, he was both an art teacher and born and brought up well outside of London. Making him Mockney No.1.Like most bio-pics, facts that don't fit the overall picture are thrown over the wall. Also chronology is not guaranteed either. Never mind the interesting bits that the micro-budget couldn't touch.Serkiss is simply great as Dury. Indeed hard to see anyone doing any better with the material. Such as it is. Why did women go for this unconventional man who clearly had a great deal of trouble thinking beyond himself and his own creature comforts? ("Don't know" says the movie very honestly. Although he may have been quite nice on the days he wasn't acting a prick. There was a brain and a conscience up there.)Like many artists you are glad for their art because it shows they had hidden depths that their appearance and behaviour didn't always indicate. Later he left music ("writers block") to try and be an actor. I don't mean play at being an actor, but become a real one. Work at it. Character roles a speciality. He did OK actually. Another fact that could have been a good 20 minutes rather than ending up over the aforementioned wall.The whole production team has worked hard to get some energy and oomph in the film and not to make it limp like the man himself, but despite that it is really only a time passer. As I have already said, the film doesn't have the budget to get involved in his era (which made him really) and while it is nice to know he had a country house and a swimming pool the real action is clearly elsewhere most of the time.

Any film featuring Andy Serkis is worth investigating. The man's magnetic, assimilating his characters sufficiently to expunge most of himself. He's also very good at swearing. Proper screen swearing is tricky as it requires total annihilation of self-consciousness - Serkis manages to get his Dury to produce profanity that is both rasping and idiomatic.The film itself is a bit irritating, inasmuch as it's rather flat. Serkis aside, the other performances are fine but no more. It moves around trying to give an impression of Dury's relationships and the background to his intense punk behaviour. We don't get a particularly fleshed out impression of the late 1960s - 80s (not least as there's a horrible anachronistic yellow-hatched 1990s 'no-stopping' road marking in shot during a 70s sequence). The montage/stage-show sequences don't tell us much about the man as they are strangely solipsistic to the biopic itself.Of the two British rock biopics released this year, Nowhere Boy is still a more even, detailed and satisfying film than this. 4/10