Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché

What appears from the out­set as anoth­er well-mean­ing and robust artist bio-doc­u­men­tary which offers a whis­tle-stop tour through a life lived at the van­guard of cre­ative expres­sion, is actu­al­ly a fair­ly sad film about a daugh­ter reflect­ing on the com­plex rela­tion­ship she had with her late mother.

The daugh­ter in ques­tion is the croaky-voiced Celeste Bell, while the moth­er is Poly Styrene (aka Mar­i­anne Elliott-Said), erst­while lead singer of ​’80s alt pop-punk out­fit X‑Ray Spex. As we take in episodes from Poly’s tumul­tuous life and career, we also receive a com­men­tary from Celeste on how these moments add to a more lucid por­trait of her louche rebel­lious ma.

The Brix­ton-born Poly Styrene burst onto the Lon­don punk scene from out of nowhere, and due to her unique fash­ion sense (anti­quat­ed char­i­ty shop threads, eye-pop­ping colours, tram-line braces on her teeth) and a boom­ing set of pipes, was embraced whole­heart­ed­ly as an alter­na­tive to the ubiq­ui­tous white male oik. The film con­tains pas­sages of Poly’s own writ­ings, intoned by Ruth Neg­ga and giv­en an extra sheen of vin­tage authen­tic­i­ty by being played back over a scratchy tape recorder.

A host of friends and acquain­tances are on hand to flesh out the pic­ture and offer their own rem­i­nisces, the most evoca­tive being one from Don Letts who details the strange machi­na­tions at a house par­ty host­ed by the Sex Pis­tols, which includ­ed Poly head­ing for a lengthy trip to the bath­room for an ad hoc image change. Indeed, this moment also acts as a piv­ot point in the nar­ra­tive, as those around Poly start­ed to believe she’s suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness and there were attempts to have her sectioned.

The film doesn’t put too fine a point on the urgency of the music and allows the ener­getic per­for­mance footage to do much of the talk­ing on that front. The band’s lyrics were sim­ple and direct, often used as a way for Poly to express con­fu­sion about her race and iden­ti­ty. There’s per­haps the sug­ges­tion that it was her impul­sive­ness as an artist, as well as an unwill­ing­ness to con­form to cor­po­rate box-tick­ing, that pre­vent­ed her and the band from becom­ing even more of a suc­cess out­side of the inte­ri­or-look­ing punk scene.

As her music career seem­ing­ly wraps up with half-an-hour still on the clock, the focus too shifts to explor­ing her suc­cess­es and fail­ures (main­ly fail­ures) as a moth­er. In a mono­logue at the begin­ning of the film, Celeste express­es trep­i­da­tion at the prospect of dig­ging into her mother’s pri­vate archive, and when you see how bad­ly she was treat­ed as a tod­dler, you under­stand straight away why.

This is a very worth­while film specif­i­cal­ly about a woman’s sour lot in the music indus­try, and the fact that Poly remains appeal­ing despite her anti­so­cial ten­den­cies is down the the care­ful tonal bal­ance that the film strikes.