London Film Festival review - When You're Strange

One’s likely enjoyment of a music documentary is proportional to one’s liking of the music in question, however good the documentary is. Therefore I love Fearless Freaks (the Flaming Lips documentary), but hate No Direction Home (even with Martin Scorsese directing, for me Bob Dylan is a jerk with a hideous singing voice). A film about the Doors was always going to appeal to me, even just as an excuse to listen to their music, but this retelling of the band’s story using only archive footage really is spell-binding.

When You’re Strange grew from an unlikely source: Dick Wolf’s production company. The creator of the (amazing) Law & Order franchise has had the rights to lots of never-before-seen footage of the Doors for a while, but didn’t know how best to use it. Tom DiCillo, the director of Johnny Suede and Living in Oblivion has managed to weave this together with other archive material to really get under the skin of Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger. Johnny Depp provides a laid back voiceover which is highly respectful of the subject matter. It is also full of surprising facts like that Light My Fire was the first song Krieger ever wrote and that at the height of Morrison’s fame, his estranged father was commanding a fleet in South East Asia.

When I watched the film, I was convinced that new footage had been made for it. A dream sequence interspersed throughout the film which appears to show Morrison driving through the desert after his death had to have been done with actors, I felt, and this annoyed me in its unnecessariness. In fact, these scenes are taken from Morrison’s film HWY: an American Pastoral (1969), and now that I know this I am retrospectively blown away by them. They look so fresh and so starkly beautiful, showing that Morrison’s time at film school was not wasted.

These clips are just some of the treats in this film for fans of the Doors. My only quibble is that with the focus so squarely on Jim, the other members of the band do get left out. This is not surprising as he was a fascinating character, and one that death made iconic. All in all this is a masterful exploration of one of the 60s’ truly great groups and their role in the end of the hippie dream.