Blisteringly caustic as ever, John Lydon nevertheless reveals himself as an occasionally sentimental sort in Tabbert Fiiller’s fitfully revelatory and charming documentary, “The Public Image Is Rotten,” screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. Ostensibly a documentary about Lydon’s epochal post-punk band Public Image Ltd., the movie turns to be more a portrait of the man himself. This makes sense, given that the band was a Lydon project from the start and he’s the only member remaining from its 1978 founding. “This old sod is going to be around for centuries,” Lydon winks early on in his usual theatrical is-he-being-sarcastic manner.
Fiiller just briefly nods to Lydon’s early Johnny Rotten persona, a decision that serves dual purposes. It announces first that we’re not going to be witnessing another “Anarchy In The U.K.” Brit-punk clipshow, and also shows just how bad a fit Lydon’s firecracker smarts were for Malcolm McLaren’s tightly managed Sex Pistols media circus. In this context, Lydon’s rhetorical “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” query at the final Sex Pistols show in 1978 isn’t used here as usual to signal the death knell of punk’s first wave, but a kind of liberation for Lydon. Freed from the McLaren-dictated visual straightjacket of “punk,” Lydon — an anarchic and idea-spitting free-thinker who clearly comprehends the punk ethos far more than the average mohawked git gobbing on him — got on to the music he really wanted to make.
Snaggle-toothed, fiery-haired, drug-thin, and drolly cynical as he was in the late 1970s, Lydon was deadly serious about Public Image Ltd., the outfit named for a Muriel Spark novel which he put together in 1978. Their sound was a jangled cacophony of keening post-punk guitar and Lydon’s caterwauling vocals. The tight and roiling rhythm section, particularly Jah Wobble’s angular bass, was fed by the spring of Lydon’s encyclopedic knowledge of dub and reggae. (A great moment in the documentary is seeing late-1970s footage of spotty, pale Lydon, who had DJ’d reggae clubs back in London, palling around with Jamaican musicians when he was scouting talent for Richard Branson.)
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Toggling between the chaotic timeline of PiL’s ever-fracturing lineup — the fractious Lydon gained and lost band members faster than Spinal Tap went through drummers — and modern interviews with an older and thicker but still spiky Lydon, “The Public Image Is Rotten” makes a strong argument for the band’s greatness. A fantastic side effect of the modern documentary explosion is the plethora of movies about influential but little-known bands (Fishbone, Minutemen, Bad Brains, and the like). Fiiller makes a strong addition to this canon, enlisting people like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, saying with utter sincerity that hearing PiL changed his life and music, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, who calls their second album “Metal Box” (aka “Second Edition”) “the ‘White Album‘ of the underground.”
The threading together of personal and artistic transitions highlights a common problem with PiL’s music, namely that it’s hard not to suspect that the more well-adjusted Lydon became in the world, the less essential his band’s music was. When the band was setting the template for underground music in the 1980s by its cool fusion of avant-garde, dance, and punk, and Lydon was merrily picking fights with media poseurs, the band’s day-to-day was constant churn and disputation. There’s little comparison between the snide genius of an early song like “Poptones” — incredibly, Fiiller leaves out the classic clip of PiL on “American Bandstand” in 1980 where a bored Lydon just wanders around the set — and the more characterless, overproduced pop of their later hit “Disappointed.”
Nobody would begrudge Lydon a stable life, of course, particularly given the harrowing story he tells about the attack of meningitis at age seven that erased all his prior memories. He seems to revel in the more workaday nature of the band’s current lineup. Still, it’s hard not to wish that Fiiller could have concocted something more compelling for a final act than the generically uplifting “Behind The Music” finale that we’re given. [B]
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