Dir. Mat Whitecross , UK, 2010, Year, 115 mins
Cast: Andy Serkis, Naomie Harris, Olivia Williams
Review by Carol Allen
This biopic of seventies punk rock star Ian Dury tells its story in an interestingly theatrical visual style and has a superb central performance from Andy Serkis as Ian Dury.
Dury, who was stricken with polio in childhood, was a highly intelligent, talented and often difficult man, who never allowed his disability to stand in the way of what he wanted to do. Before turning to music, he was an art teacher, having studied under artist Peter Blake at the Royal College of Art and the film's visual style owes much to Blake, who contributed to the design of the film. Whitecross and writer Paul Viragh use a sometimes literally theatrical style, with Ian narrating his own story on the empty stage of a theatre, then going into flashbacks, which are a mixture of realism and surrealism with occasional use of animation and colourful, Blake style graphic backgrounds They lace that with misty black and white, period archive and colour drained sequences of young Ian in the horrendous special school he was sent to as a child, because of his disability. The fast cutting of the lavishly used musical numbers and the immense energy of the film throughout all vividly capture the character of the man, whose story it is telling. It's a complicated structure but totally clear and very effective.
The settings of the more realistic aspects of the film are also completely in key with the story, as in the grubby flat where Ian's first group, Kilburn and the Highroads, are rehearsing, while Ian's wife Betty (Williams) is giving birth in another room to their son Baxter (Bill Milner) in a sequence which is both shocking and funny, and in the luridly decorated and very sixties/seventies punk hippy flat, where Ian and his young mistress Denise (Harris) set up home, after he leaves his wife and child.
Serkis is virtually perfect as Dury, a role he was almost born to play. Sometimes scary and unpredictable, then tender and vulnerable, brave, defiant and also selfish. It's a complex performance of a complicated man. Williams and Harris give strong support as the women in his life and the supportive friendship which grows between them is much more interesting than a simple rivalry would be. Bill Milner's already proved his is a cracking young actor in films such as Rambow and Is Anybody There? but this role stretches him into adolescence. The parallels drawn between Ian's difficult relationship with his son and that with his own father (Ray Winstone) are a touch strained but they still work And there's a very quiet and effective performance from Tom Hughes as Chaz Jankel, co-writer with Dury of many of the hit songs. Hughes has a beautiful smile, which speaks volumes.
The film is often very funny and in places moving, as in a sequence where adult Ian is taking a class with disabled children at that same school, where we see him in flashback being brutally bullied by his teacher (Toby Jones) and his fellow pupils. The musicians playing Dury's group The Blockheads capture the anarchic energy of the big hit numbers, such as "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" and the title song and the lyrics are cleverly used to take the story forward. This is a very enjoyable and lively film with loads of really satisfying meat in it.
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