When You’re Strange
- Written and directed by Tom DiCillo
- Starring Jim Morrison, Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore
- Narrated by Johnny Depp
- Classification: NA
Like most reportage on the Doors, When You’re Strange has a crush on the singer. It’s too fawning and fluttery by half. Still, Tom DiCillo’s documentary is the place to start if you hope to understand Mr. Mojo Risin’ – Jim Morrison’s proud anagram and rallying cry.
The movie is only interested in Morrison, which is unfortunate, because the band was at least half the Doors. Certainly the group gives DiCillo’s film its juice. The documentary is a mish-mash of 1960s press conferences, studio sessions, TV and concert footage. But what mish. What mash. Like the best rock bands, the Doors were expert thieves, as they prove here in Break on Through, a blistering blues that ransacks bossa nova, Ray Charles’s What’d I Say and Paul Butterfield’s Shake Your Money-Maker to thrilling effect.
Break on Through, Light My Fire, Roadhouse Blues – the blues-jazz-soul riffs keep on coming, making When You’re Strange a welcome reminder how vital mongrel rock ’n’ roll can be.
The rest of the Doors weren’t strange or sexy. That was Morrison’s job. His father was the Navy admiral who commanded the U.S. fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a 1964 provocation that caused the Vietnam War to escalate. Son Jim wanted a bigger bang. He hoped to kick start a second American Revolution, leading flower children back to the wilderness and teaching them to “dance on fire.”
To that end, he performed his own version of Oedipus Rex during the song, The End, threatening to kill his father.
None of this would’ve mattered if Morrison looked like Bob (the Bear) Hite, slob singer of another worthy Los Angeles blues band, Canned Heat. But Morrison was beautiful, wrote Beat-inspired poetry and wore tight leather pants.
He became a celebrity – a shooting star – real fast. The Doors rehearsed in organist Ray Manzarek’s family’s garage. Morrison sent everyone home to write one weekend. Guitarist Robbie Krieger returned with his first song, Light My Fire, a hit within months. Soon the Doors were on The Ed Sullivan Show.
But fame wasn’t all Morrison craved. “We want the world and we want it now,” he sang. When that didn’t happen, when it appeared revolution was something neither his band or fans wanted, he turned on everyone. In When You’re Strange’s 20-minute set piece, a riveting reconstruction of the band’s infamous 1969 Miami bust, Morrison tries to expose himself. At one point, we hear him yelling at the crowd, “You’re all a bunch of sheep.”
The Doors in a publicity image from When You're Strange.
He was drinking too much and doing whatever drugs were on the table. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” Morrison was fond of saying, quoting William Blake. For Morrison, the road led to a Paris bathtub, where he died of a heart attack at age 27, in 1971.
When You’re Strange is narrated by a solemn Johnny Depp and includes too much sixties sermonizing. As mentioned, the movie occasionally goes soft on Morrison, staring dumbstruck at its hero. But the music is great. And the documentary captures the Doors’ meteoric rise and murky collapse with dramatic authority.
The film is sure to inspire more treks to Morrison’s Paris grave. There, worshippers will find flowers and a tablet with a Greek inscription reading, “True to his own genius.” It’s an attempt at reconciliation placed there in 1990 by Admiral Morrison, the father Jim Morrison wanted killed.
Special to The Globe and Mail
