By Iggy Pop and Jim Jarmusch sound like an unlikely pairing. One’s the primal frontman of proto-punk legends The Stooges, the other’s a mellow, measured indie auteur. But maybe there’s something magnetic about their respective brands of Midwest cool. In the early ’90s, Jarmusch shot a short with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop (née James Osterberg) called “Somewhere in California”. It would win the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, and was included in Jarmusch’s 2004 anthology Coffee and Cigarettes.
Gimme Danger is part of Jarmusch’s two-picture deal with Amazon Studios. The other film in the deal, Paterson, offers a direct shout-out to Iggy Pop in one scene. Paterson is easily one of the best movies of 2016. As for Gimme Danger, it’s sort of a letdown for fans of The Stooges and of Jarmusch. The reason has a lot to do with shape.
[This review originally ran as part of Flixist’s coverage of the 54th New York Film Festival. It has been reposted to coincide with the theatrical release of the film.]
Gimme Danger
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Release Date: October 28, 2016
Rating: R
I’ll start by accentuating the positive. It’s great to watch the Stooges take a victory lap. After years of being a posse of indigent riffraff, The Stooges are now music demigods. On camera, Iggy Pop has such a smooth, comforting cool about him. Whenever he’s telling a story, I experienced an anticipatory glee, waiting for that smirk to flourish into laughter and an unbridled smile. Stooges drummer Scott Asheton, by contrast, has a labored voice of a working class life lived hard. His late brother, Ron, pops up in archival interviews. Latter-day Stooges member James Williamson sits near his amp in a bathroom; we also spend some time with Minuteman frontman Mike Watt, who’s part of The Stooges’ reunion lineup.
After the pre-title stinger (standard issue in so many docs these days), Jarmusch starts in Iggy Pop’s childhood. Little James Osterberg, who lived in a trailer, tortured his parents with a drumkit and learned punk stagecraft from The Howdy Doody Show. We then zip through the band’s formation in the ’60s, with a little bit of exploration of the political scene in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Stooges live communally, and share the stage with their big brother band The MC5. Then they record their self-titled album, and then they put out Funhouse, and then it’s on to Raw Power. And then this happens, and then this other thing, oh and this.
At a certain point it dawned on me: Gimme Danger was mostly comprised of “and-thens”. It’s more like the events as fleshed out bullet points, not the life of a band as an essay.
Jarmusch includes footage of the infamous Cincinnati Pop Fest performance in which Iggy Pop, held aloft by the crowd, smears peanut butter all over his chest and goes hogwild. So oddball and unconventional, which makes the limp plainness of Gimme Danger a bummer. It doesn’t feel like a Jarmusch movie at all. Instead, it’s more like a competent TV documentary on The Stooges, but one that never really goes deep enough. They mention the radical politics of Ann Arbor and hanging with The MC5, but that’s it. They mention a stint in the Chelsea Hotel, but not much more than the fact they stayed there. So much room for expansion, amusing tangents, the sorts of anecdotes that give texture to a life. But mostly it’s all back to the bullet points.
I come back to the idea of shape that I mentioned earlier. While talking about “Search and Destroy” on Raw Power, Iggy explains the metaphoric shape of the song. Williamson’s guitar fills the space in such a dense way, and that informed how Ron played his leads and how Iggy did his vocals. Pieces come together, play off each other, rework and reconstitute themselves, and find a means of working in combination that kicks like a goddamn drum. You hear or sense that shaping everywhere on Raw Power, which is why it’s one of the best albums of all time. You’re listening to a band when it gets it and gels.
Gimme Danger seems to lack this sense of shape, or cohesion, if you prefer. If this interview goes here, how is it complemented there? And if this footage does this, what should that footage do to complement it? Admittedly, editing seems like the most difficult part of documentary film. Still, I wonder what Gimme Danger might have been with just a bit more shaping. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not something I’ll put on repeat.
