Gary Numan: Android in La La Land

With so many music doc­u­men­taries around that focus on great artists with a ten­den­cy towards ego­ma­nia, it’s refresh­ing to find one that’s about a musi­cian – and a high­ly influ­en­tial one at that – who seems entire­ly unin­ter­est­ed in self-mythol­o­gis­ing. Android in La La Land pro­files elec­tro pop pio­neer Gary Numan, who was derid­ed and revered in the press in equal mea­sure as he went about sell­ing mil­lions of albums in the late 1970s and ear­ly ​’80s, before it all came crash­ing down.

While we do get a stan­dard talk­ing heads set­up for the ear­ly career por­trait part, much of the film is built around a real-time look at the pro­duc­tion and life changes sur­round­ing Numan’s 2013 album ​‘Splin­ter’, which would go on to be his best-sell­ing and best-reviewed album in decades. Among the upheavals is the mov­ing of his fam­i­ly, includ­ing three young daugh­ters, from Britain to Amer­i­ca, with Numan see­ing a for­ay into the world of Hol­ly­wood film scores (à la Trent Reznor) as a log­i­cal career progression.

The focus on the album’s pro­duc­tion allows for poignan­cy that comes from observ­ing how ther­a­peu­tic its cre­ation becomes for Numan. The film’s emo­tion­al cen­tre, though, is the dynam­ic between Gary and his wife, Gem­ma. As a for­mer super-fan, she states that her teenage ambi­tion was sim­ply to mar­ry her idol. Despite that poten­tial­ly inaus­pi­cious start to a rela­tion­ship, her pres­ence in his life has pro­vid­ed sta­bil­i­ty, and Steve Read and Rob Alexander’s doc­u­men­tary thrives on their on-screen ban­ter, which often involves bizarre con­ver­sa­tions or minor spats that blend sweet and sar­don­ic tones. With a lot of endear­ing humour com­ing from their chil­dren, too, the film inad­ver­tent­ly makes the case for Numan and fam­i­ly to star in a less obnox­ious spin on the for­mu­la of The Osbournes.

Yet although the direc­tors pro­vide plen­ty of fas­ci­nat­ing mate­r­i­al regard­ing Numan’s per­son­al tur­moil – his depres­sion and diag­no­sis with Asperger’s Syn­drome – dur­ing the peri­od between his ear­ly career highs and lat­ter-day come­back, putting the music itself on the back­burn­er results in a lack of clar­i­ty over the pro­gres­sion in style from his ear­ly ​‘android’ per­sona in the ear­ly ​’80s to now, where his mode is more in the vein of var­i­ous acts he’s inspired and since col­lab­o­rat­ed with, like Nine Inch Nails.

For a film that doesn’t start off as seem­ing like a hard­core fans only affair, the scant insight into near­ly two decades worth of the man’s cre­ative out­put seems a curi­ous treat­ment of the casu­al lis­ten­er or out­right Numan novice.