Talking of music biopics, here's one which is resolutely non-doo wop but of particular interest to me, as it dramatises the last days of ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones. I don't think there was a critical consensus about this film's merits but I was fascinated by it as I had laboured unsuccessfully some years before to create a coherent stage play linking Brian Jones with AA Milne.
Jones had bought what had been Milne's home (he died in 1956) as part of his attempt to get-it-together-in-the-country after a series of drugs busts and troubles with his personal and professional relationships with the other Stones; he famously drowned in the pool which I think had been added by the American couple who had owned the place in the interim.
The play failed overall, probably because I was never able to get a real sense of who Jones was, nor to bring out any connection between the two men which seemed more than "an accident of geography" as one literary manager rather devastatingly put it: a painful lesson that if a play doesn't have a shape then ultimately dialogue counts for nothing. Whether that experience should make me particularly well qualified to pass judgement on the film or debar me from comment, my review, which has already appeared on a well-known shopping website, follows. I have come unstuck in the past when trying to update reviews on the hoof, so will add further thoughts separately.
