| Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll | |
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Best of all, Serkis even sings like Dury and all the music here is Serkis performing with Dury’s old band, The Blockheads. If that sounds like a disaster in the offing, Dury’s long term collaborator Chaz Jankel has stated he heard a track coming from the studio and assumed the boys were playing Serkis the original for reference. In fact, they were listening to a take Serkis had recorded. This isn’t a mere impersonation. This isn’t even just acting. This is Serkis disappearing into a simply brilliant portrayal of one of music’s most interesting, charming, and frequently unpleasant, characters. The film takes a scatter gun approach to Dury’s eccentric existence, from the early days of his first band, Kilburn and the High Roads, to the latter stages of his career. It’s pretty much warts and all, touching on Dury’s apparent abandonment issues, his unpleasant childhood, the polio that left him with one withered leg through his adult life and, most of all, his generally unusual relationships with his nearest and dearest, including first wife Betty (Williams), long-term girlfriend Denise (Harris), members of the band and, particularly, his son Baxter (Milner). Whitecross plays around with structure, celebrating Dury the artist and poet with visual abandon. It’s essentially the sort of creativity you expected Sam Taylor-Wood to try with the pedestrian Nowhere Boy. That left you feeling you’d seen a masterclass in brittle acting from Kristin Scott-Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff rather than learned anything about Lennon. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll wades heartily into every aspect of Dury’s nature, from the charm to the more, well, “cunty” aspects: the result is a biopic that leaves you feeling you’ve actually got closer to its subject. And above all there’s that central performance. Serkis MUST be rewarded with every possible acting gong available. He won’t win the Oscar – I doubt Dury’s witty word play and Essex English made much impact that side of the Atlantic – but if BAFTA don’t throw little statues at him, there is no justice. He’s exceptional and the film is brilliant. Finally, a work of genius about a genius. You could knock me down with a feather... Rating: ***** Check out the other recent biopic Nowhere Boy or the utterly bizarre take on the genre White Lightnin' |
According to Ian Dury – and the posted for this dazzling movie - there are a couple of ways to avoid death. One, the Basildon punk poet suggested, was to be magnificent. On that basis, and on this performance, Andy Serkis is now immortal. 
