Gimme Dan­ger

Jim Jar­musch direct­ing a film about The Stooges is one of those per­fect match­es of artist and sub­ject. Though the resul­tant doc­u­men­tary, Gimme Dan­ger, is, at the very least, good, there’s the per­sis­tent sense through­out that something’s missing.

For one thing, any­one look­ing for recog­nis­able idio­syn­crasies of Jarmusch’s fic­tion work will be dis­ap­point­ed. Struc­tural­ly, this is, for the most part, firm­ly in the talk­ing heads and archive mate­r­i­al mode, with sto­ries large­ly deliv­ered by James Oster­berg (aka Iggy Pop) and still-liv­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors in a vari­ety of work­place or homey back­drops. And the film sticks almost exclu­sive­ly in ado­ra­tion mode, posit­ing The Stooges as the great­est rock and roll band right off the bat and rarely delv­ing into more objec­tive crit­i­cism of the group’s out­put, bar gui­tarist James Williamson lament­ing the mix­ing of third album Raw Power.

There is some cre­ative flair, how­ev­er. When it comes to mak­ing things visu­al­ly inter­est­ing, Jar­musch employs an Errol Mor­ris-ish tech­nique of using old film clips as means of humor­ous punc­tu­a­tion for anec­dotes not cov­ered in archive footage. Com­ple­ment­ing this, there are also a few ani­mat­ed sequences of the band’s escapades as young men, with a look and style that’s almost akin to Ter­ry Gilliam’s Mon­ty Python work if it were spliced togeth­er with Beav­is and Butthead.

The film is ded­i­cat­ed to four band mem­bers who have passed away, includ­ing drum­mer Scott Asheton, who is inter­viewed in the doc (includ­ing once along­side Iggy) but died in 2014 before its com­ple­tion. His broth­er, fel­low band­mate Ron, fea­tures heav­i­ly in archive inter­view form only, due to his pass­ing in 2009. Con­sid­er­ing the dwin­dling num­ber of key fig­ures to speak to, Jar­musch might have been tempt­ed to make this an all-encom­pass­ing doc about Iggy, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing their pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tions with his fic­tion fea­tures, but there is a res­olute com­mit­ment on his part to keep this sole­ly about The Stooges.

Any brief dis­cus­sion of solo out­put tends to be relat­ed to every­one out­side of the front­man, while Iggy’s for­ay to Berlin with David Bowie in the late ​’70s, which result­ed in his two most famous solo albums, is amus­ing­ly retained as a throw­away com­ment. Nor will you find Iggy’s ​’90s resur­gence brought up with an expect­ed clip of ​‘Lust for Life’ scor­ing Ewan McGregor’s mad dash in Trainspot­ting. Inter­est­ing­ly, Todd Haynes’ Vel­vet Gold­mine, which fea­tured McGre­gor as an Iggy ana­logue, is direct­ly attrib­uted with sow­ing the seeds for the band’s ear­ly ​’00s reunion, thanks to var­i­ous non-Iggy mem­bers recon­ven­ing to rework some of their clas­sic songs for the soundtrack.

Inevitably, though, Iggy’s sur­vival means he’s the film’s anchor, and it’s his cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ry­telling, full of both artic­u­late rem­i­nis­cences and daft flights of deranged fan­cy, that helps to over­look the film’s over­all lack of weight in light of the tragedies it tends to only flirt with rather than engage full-on.