Riding Out Morrison's Storm

WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE (2009)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

When I think of the leather-clad, raging soul of Jim Morrison, I think of the range of powerful soothing chords of "Riders of the Storm" (the perfect song to hear on a slow New Mexico ride to Taos), the soulful strains of "Unknown Soldier," and the expressively upbeat "L.A. Woman." Interestingly, as in Oliver Stone's hyperkinetic film bio, the new documentary, "When You're Strange" operates with these songs in the same order. Though there is not much new to glean from "When You're Strange," there are some oddities and interesting trivia (The Who opened for The Doors once) that will keep Morrison fans riveted for an hour and a half.

"When You're Strange" charts the rise of a poet who hated his father (a Navy admiral in charge of his fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin debacle) and claimed his parents were dead, to his start and eventual drop-out from NYU film school to the Venice Beach days of living on a rooftop and cavorting with Ray Manzarek, a keyboard player, whom he sang his lyrics to, to forming a band with Robby Krieger (who never used picks) on guitar and the drummer John Densmore. Jim ingests copious drugs, drinks heavily, becomes bloated and a media superstar and we get the gradual picture that it isn't about the band - it is about Jim taking the spotlight. One gets the impression that director Tom DiCillo is more critical of the Lizard King than Oliver Stone ever was.

New, spectacular footage shows a bearded Jim Morrison on the desert road - singing, laughing and screaming, observing a nearly dead dog on the road (some of these moments play like outtakes from Oliver Stone's own Doors film or "U-Turn"). But most of the film, except for some candid shots of a smiling Lizard King, is focused on the downward spiral of a man who allegedly exposed himself on stage and was more soused than the average drunk. It is deduced that such drunken rages and falling asleep on the concert stage were an act of garnering media attention since the band stopped getting any (heck, they could barely play their music during the outrage). Then Jim, deeply in love with his girlfriend, Pam, and somehow renewed in his sense of purpose, finds himself dead at the age of 27 in Paris. And it seems, perhaps, that his disapproving father finally admits his son had talent.

"When You're Strange" is sort of a distant echo of Oliver Stone's controversial film (a montage of Robert Kennedy's assassination and images of Charles Manson also figure in Stone's film) yet this film (with added narration by Johnny Depp) adds immeasurably more mystery and a measure of depth to Morrison than ever before. It is one of those "regretful" rock documentaries, the kind that makes you wonder, what if Jim had lived on past his 27th birthday. It also shows the tortured poet who chose music as his vessel of opening the doors of his perception. He wrote books of poetry but they required solace to write them. Jim needed the stage to exhibit his demons, his passions, his life - he desperately needed an audience. "When You're Strange" exemplifies that and gives us a Jim Morrison that perhaps we didn't know.