Le Révélateur
Many are the documentaries made about cult bands. Few are those that are any good; that rise above their simple ambitions and tell a story suitably cinematic. And rare are those that are not only actual works of worthy cinema, but feature actual tangible moments in which you witness them making that transformation, transcending the standard tropes of the rockumentary and become something of worth.
In The Fearless Freaks, Bradley Beesley's motion-picture portrait of alt-rock institution The Flaming Lips, the film truly comes to life, right before your eyes, in a single scene. In it, Flaming Lips drummer-cum-multi-instrumentalist, Steven Drozd, is preparing and dosing heroin, talking candidly throughout about his downward spiral into drug addiction.
It seems a lot like Drozd bottoming out, but self-consciously so; inviting Beesley's camera to peer on him at his lowest ebb, to serve in judgment on what his life has come to. Drozd talks, at times painfully, of no longer wanting to live that way; talks of needing to right his sinking ship. This public shaming is clearly, from that point on, going to serve as a burning reminder, there now thousands of witnesses who'll never allow Drozd, if only in his mind, to fail them all yet again.
The scene is not just shockingly intimate and quietly confronting, but worn as emblem for the film itself. Made, as it is, by a friend/collaborateur of the band The Fearless Freaks is a band-portrait defined by its intimacy; a true behind-the-scenes that sparkles due to the candor of its subjects, and the lack of fawning reverence towards them.
Out of Our Pasts
The spirit of the film isn't Beesley's contrivance, but, really, the doing of Wayne Coyne. As witnessed in this documentary, Coyne is one part eccentric musical visionary, one part ultra-friendly people-person. As a litany of interviews have noted over the years, Coyne is as energetic, effusive, and polite as can be; a mad dreamer who'll happily talk your ear off about whatever's on his brain.
In The Fearless Freaks, we're casually, happily invited into, um, Wayne's World. We see him mowing the lawn at his house, we meet his wife, speak to his parents and siblings, and learn all about the chequered history of the Coyne clan.
If Drozd's story —drug abuse, mother and siblings lost to suicide, brother in prison— seems loaded with pathos, Coyne's seems weirdly joyous and celebratory, even as he details the death of his father, and the varying addictions and troubles of his brothers.
Invariably, the film makes the obvious thematic leap: this is the spirit that powers the music of the Flaming Lips themselves. It was the death of Coyne's father, after all, that inspired possibly their most famous song, the achingly poignant "Do You Realize??" (from 2002's much-beloved Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots). A celebration of life in the face of death, it's a joyous anthem built to fill stadiums; the song that encapsulates the current mode of the band.
Born as a bunch of freaks blasting out noise, the Flaming Lips have survived and, invariably, thrived, against weighted odds and manifold obstacles. You don't need to know the narrative of where they've come from to be touched by their grandiose, ridiculous music, but, once you do, it adds another layer to the sound.
Studio: Shout Factory
Release Date: May 17, 2005
