Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Limp­ing onto the stage of his own imag­i­na­tion, Ian Dury – artist, singer and punk poet of the work­ing class­es – emerges as some­thing both hero­ic and apolo­getic in Mat White­cross’ lary solo debut.

As embod­ied by Andy Serkis, Dury is an orig­i­nal musi­cal hooli­gan – the kind of man who’d rather prac­tice with his band than wit­ness the birth of his son. Emerg­ing out of the art school scene of the late ​’60s, he devel­oped a dis­tinc­tive brand of urban lyri­cism, which Serkis deliv­ers with lusty North Lon­don blus­ter. The vehi­cle for this punk poet­ry is The Block­heads, whose suc­cess lift­ed Dury from the squalid pub cir­cuit to the top of the charts. But as his career accel­er­ates, Dury suf­fers a kind of exis­ten­tial whiplash, strug­gling to bal­ance the demands of fam­i­ly, mis­tress and music.

The result of this emo­tion­al equiv­o­ca­tion is the slow-motion implo­sion of his son, Bax­ter (played by Son of Rambow’s Bill Mil­ner). Sur­round­ed by temp­ta­tion and denied any exam­ple beyond his father’s lib­er­tine impuls­es, it’s not long before the young­ster has grown his hair, downed some pills and start­ed throw­ing fur­ni­ture out of school win­dows. This dis­in­te­grat­ing rela­tion­ship illu­mi­nates the lin­ger­ing sense of loss and betray­al that Dury feels towards his own father, played in flash­back by Ray Win­stone. His father’s death left Dury, who had been crip­pled by polio at the age of sev­en, aban­doned to a sadis­tic nurse in a hos­pi­tal for dis­abled chil­dren, where the first seeds of rebel­lion took root.

All of which is ground cov­ered in a film that explodes into life from the minute pop-art guru Peter Blake’s open­ing cred­its crowd the screen. Com­bined with Peter Chris­telis’ skit­tish edit­ing and Mat White­cross’ dynam­ic work behind the cam­era, it all adds up to a film that works very hard to dis­tin­guish itself from oth­er run-of-the-mill rock biopics.

This is, at heart, a sto­ry about a frus­trat­ed fam­i­ly man, wary of but help­less before the pit­falls of fame. Andy Serkis, here divest­ed of the CG baubles that have accom­pa­nied his best known work as Gol­lum and King Kong, kills it in the lead role, cap­tur­ing the fine blend of joy and anger that defined Dury’s ​‘pol­lut­ed genius’. He’s espe­cial­ly strong in the scenes in which Dury stands up to the patro­n­is­ing atti­tude of the Spas­tics Soci­ety (as it was then), deliv­er­ing the anar­chic broad­side of ​‘Spas­ti­cus Autis­ti­cus’ with defi­ant energy.

But there’s still some­thing struc­tural­ly famil­iar about the film. This is a clas­sic three-act tale, with per­son­al obsta­cles best­ed and lessons duti­ful­ly learned. For all that it’s enlivened by some strong per­for­mances and a con­vinc­ing emo­tion­al core, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a fam­i­ly melo­dra­ma in rock ​‘n’ roll trousers. But man, it knows how to wear them.