Wednesday 5 September 2018

Working Class Boy (2018) - Movie Review


The plot (such as it is): Born in Glasgow, Scotland, James Dixon Swan grew up surrounded by a hostile environment and a highly volatile family unit. However, when his mother moves the family from Scotland to Adelaide, Western Australia, the young James began the path that lead him to becoming an artist that would captivate audiences all over the world: Jimmy Barnes.

To help put this into a more national context, Jimmy Barnes has embedded himself in Aussie history as one of our greatest musical talents, up there with the likes of fellow Scottish-Australians AC/DC. Start singing the words “Working hard to make a living, bringing shelter from the rain” in a crowded pub around here and you’re likely to get the entire crowd started up in a rendition of Working Class Man. The man’s vocals owe far more to soul artists like Tina Turner than they do to most rock bands, as his impassioned wailing hit square at the heart with every syllable that escapes his lips. He’s an artist that, quite frankly, could benefit from a production like this, giving a prospective audience a chance to peel back the layers of Glaswegian scar tissue to see what made this man who he is today.

And sure enough, under the direction of Mark Joffe, who in the past struck gold along Scottish/Australian cultural lines with Billy Connelly’s The Man Who Sued God, we get more than an eyeful of Jimmy’s upbringing. Jimmy’s descriptions of the neighbourhood he grew up in almost paint a better picture than the literal pictures we’re given, depicting soot-covered buildings, mud-covered roads, and shit-covered back alleys due to a lack of indoor plumbing. Even closer than just the surrounding geography, the way his home life is depicted is less like a domestic habitat and more like a war zone, with how violent and chilling his descriptions of the fights between his parents can get. When it gets to the point of him highlighting the moment that he stopped being James Dixon Swan and became Jimmy Barnes is the kind of moment that screams for cinematic representation, with something as simple as a lighthouse-shaped lamp becoming a symbol of everything that Jimmy wanted as a child and, after some rough times both in Scotland and in South Australia, he finally got form his step-father.

Of course, this kind of story about an artist who rose from heart-crushing environments and made his own mark on the world is something of a commonality in the world of music. Hell, it might be so common that it has become rather fetishized, as if a person has to come out of a rough childhood in order for their success to mean anything. This is where the handling of tone from both Jimmy and Joffe ends up winning the film its biggest points as, while it doesn’t shy away from the grittier details of his past, Jimmy himself makes it a point not to romanticise his own background, even as an impetus for his later music career. The moments where he pin points influential musical moments from his childhood, like his gripping recollection of hearing Mahalia Jackson’s powerful voice in the film Imitation Of Life, stand out like beacons against the darkness. Their impact may be hardened knowing how much they would have meant to a young Jimmy against all the chaos and alcohol-fuelled carnage that was around him, but it doesn’t come across like we’re presented with one solely to bolster the other. Rather, it feels more like it’s done to give a piece of the complete picture… which given the narrative progression of the film itself is slightly surprising.

Even with how well-known Jimmy Barnes is over here, there is still a certain understanding when it comes to documentaries that in order for a person’s life events to resonate, they need to be put in the right context. This film, unfortunately, doesn’t provide all of that where it’s most needed. The audience gets shown a lot about Jimmy’s childhood, how he came to Australia, and even how he first hooked up with the members of Cold Chisel, but the film is clearly far more interested in the boy than the man he would become. Given the title of the film, that makes sense, but it still leaves the overall product feeling like we’re missing part of the thematic puzzle. By the time it even gets to looking at Jimmy’s musical career at any great length, it’s almost an afterthought as if Joffe and co. realised how long they were spending with the earlier parts of the story and had to get to the ‘important’ parts quickly.
 
Add to this the visually-lacking tone of the production, often just letting Jimmy’s words express all that is supposedly needed, and this film ends up coming across like it’s a thinly-veiled commercial for the memoir that this production spawned from. It’s a work that, rather than telling its own complete story, falls into the pitfall of far too many documentaries and tries to cover everything… only without realising that it keeps missing crucial details. Watching this as someone who knows Jimmy far more by reputation than by his body of work, I wouldn’t be surprised if newcomers came away from this film thinking that Jimmy had a hard childhood and that’s it.

All in all, this is rather unfortunately one for the die-hard fans of Mr. Barnes, as anyone more casual than that likely won’t benefit from a documentary that is this lacking context. Jimmy’s narration and narrative walkthrough of his childhood can make for rather gripping stuff, and the musical performances that inter-cut that storytelling definitely shows that Jimmy still has an amazing set of pipes on him, but between the lack of cinematic-worthy visuals and the inherent assumptions about how much the audience knows about the story going into it, this isn’t the strongest effort we could have gotten out of the proceedings. Hell, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this film solely existed just to drum up interest in the titular memoir, which admittedly is perfectly fine but it doesn’t leave this production as anything that can rightfully stand on its own. A lot of the documentaries I cover on this blog usually left me with a feeling that I had gained a better appreciation for the subject than I had before, like with Eight Days A Week or even Citizenfour. This, I am sorry to say, doesn't give the same effect.

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