Review: Iggy Pop Bares All, and Nothing, in ‘Gimme Danger’

I really don't like the new trend of animation in documentaries.

The most insightful parts to "Gimme Danger," reveal just how much thought went into the seemingly primal, tossed off music. The shambolic performances of The Stooges were as deliberate as they were inventive and improvised. Perhaps some of it is a bit of Iggy's rationalization after the fact; As with any art, sometimes the meaning doesn't come until after the creation.
I could listen to Iggy talk all day, and the engagement only lagged in parts. But as with most of Jarmusch's films, there is a deliberate lack of central narrative or point of view that makes this little more than a surface level introduction. Even removing Iggy's solo career, his life during those times was intense to say the least. But unlike "Born to Lose," the documentary that explored the all-too-brief life of the equally intense Johnny Thunders, there's very little in the way of story. Personal relationships are summed up in a sentence or two, particularly the Tony DeFries story. Even the historical context of the band seemed to drop out at the midway point.
While I certainly don't need footage of Iggy rolling around on glass to prove anything, I do wish this movie had a bit more substance.
At least it's a great Intro to the man and the band, for those who aren't familiar.

Reading this review one thing is clear. The reviewer missed the point. Perhaps this is because the reviewer was not in fact the audience that this documentary was made for. Perhaps his life has been too, um ‘prim’, so that if he is not confronted with a sufficient spectacle, blood, heroin, glass and guts, of Dionysian proportions, he becomes bored, he returns to his own staid Apollonian life, disappointed in the world that I guess he never attempted to enter. What he did not notice or read in the film was for example the astonishing way in which record company executives failed to see the genius of a band. How those who wanted to monetize the act, to profit off the transgression were simply blind to the genius of the band, as a collective. He failed to see how integral the interviews with the other members of the band were, how the complex and subtle, and fragile rock and roll communism rolled on in intensity for a brief flash. How the sheer chaos of the situation, to paraphrase Nietzsche, gave birth to a dancing star." And no that star is not Iggy Pop but the Stooges. They were as Iggy mentioned communists in practice. They shared creative spirit without reducing their band to an egoistic front man. The demand and tragedy of our present reality is to find the singular genius behind every endeavor. Part of the point of this film was to simply undermine that mediocre egoism.

So, looking forward to seeing this, and on recalling the sort of stuff Stephen Holden has reviewed in the past, he would never have come to mind as someone to review this film. A bio-pic on Jackson Browne or Carly Simon, yes. Iggy Pop & The Stooges, no.

I had the extraordinary privilege of growing up in 1960's Ann Arbor. The rock and roll bands in that place at that time were some of the greatest ever. Almost all of them are now forgotten, while a few are remembered and even revered for work which is far from their actual best. The Stooges are the exception. While they were very often an awesome spectacle on stage they were almost never any good, but they were near perfect on their three recordings which combine as the original testament of rock and roll. Unlike their contemporaries who built teenage anthems out of blues, country, and pop standard frameworks, the Stooges rejected all convention and re-defined the genre as indigenous tribal youth music. There were no covers at a Stooges show, no hint of any influence, no angry homage to "God Save the Queen," only primal adolescence stripped into guitars, drums, an occasional screeching sax, and the Ig's incantatory pounding vocal. I saw the band maybe a hundred times, the last in a local junior high school auditorium. As usual they were out of tune and noisy, outrageous and hypnotic. They ended their set with each band member in turn laying his axe in front of his amps, turned up full, and walking off. Scott Asheton kicked over his drums to exit and Iggy, near naked and alone on stage, dropped his mic and fell over the proscenium edge in the din of feedback. After a few ear-shattering minutes, a roady came out and turned everything off and the show was over.

If I were to go to work tomorrow and do my job as poorly as Stephen Holden has done with this review I would be fired. As most of the commentators have pointed out, this is not a "portrait of Iggy Pop" but a movie about the band The Stooges. The sad thing is that after, apparently, seeing this movie, Mr. Holden still does not understand the importance of the other members of this band.

This film is not a portrait of Iggy Pop. It is a portrait of The Stooges, and that renders most of this review an exercise in futility. The obvious homework can be assumed to have been assigned to this reviewer.

The Stooges are not the greatest rock and roll band ever. They are not even the greatest protopunk band ever. That distinction belongs to the Ramones (with nods to several earlier purveyors of the genre.) The Stooges are one of the most influential bands of all time, and worthy of being the focus of this documentary.

"...inexplicably leaves out Iggy Pop’s solo career....” ,
I'll pile on with most of the others here: since the film's title is "Gimme Danger, the Story of The Stooges", I would expect it to be about that band, not Iggy Pop's solo work ( especially if it only discussed two albums from his multi-decade solo career).
And, though I've not seen it yet, sounds like it focuses on the music and performance - I'm glad to know this doc doesn't fall into tiresome, lazy, clichés about drinking/drug-taking/broken glass.

I was also in attendance at Walter Reade last night for the premiere
of Gimme Danger at Walter Reade. My only issues with the film are that so much of the visuals had to be fulfilled by animation or non-Stooges footage, given the dearth of usable live or other footage as the filmmaker as amply
noted the past few weeks in interviews. I can sort of see
why Jim wanted to keep the commentary to band members and
the Stooges "family," but it might've been nice to have at least
some real fans and real experts hold forth just for a few minutes.
As Jarmusch noted during the Q/A, if he'd done a film on
Iggy's entire career it would be 15 hours long. Indeed, but what matters most is whether they are an important rock and roll band, and whether or not their oeuvre holds up for eternity, etc. Another thing I have to say though is that it's impossible for Jarmusch or any filmmaker to include all details of the band's history in a 90 minute film. I myself, a Stooges fan for at least 25 years now, had to still go back online the past few days and fill in the gaps, such as the complex and often abrasive/troubled history of James Williamson's involvement in the band, etc. But the film, overall, I thought, was wonderful, and makes a good solid introduction to The Stooges and makes a grand case for their solid place in rock and roll and proto-punk history. But as Iggy himself says at the end, "I don't wanna be a punk, alterna-artist, or any of those things....I just wanna be me."

This reviewer makes the classic mistake of thinking a band's frontman is synonymous with the band itself, and thus thinking this documentary about the Stooges amounts to a "documentary portrait of Iggy Pop." This leads to more mistakes, such as wishing for coverage of Iggy's solo career, which would have been out of place, and discounting as uninteresting the interviews of the other band members.

Well anyway, I love the band, and I saw this doc tonight (along with Q&A of Jarmusch and Iggy) and loved that too.

When I first saw Iggy and the Psychedelic Stooges at the Grande Ballroom in 1969, I pegged him for no-talent trailer trash, desperate to make a name for himself with gimmicky antics. When he dove off the stage headfirst nobody tried to catch him, because they didn't want any to get on their hands. All these years later, he hasn't improved a bit, but it's amazing how many people have been taken in by his jive. The chance of me paying good money to see his skinny naked torso on the big screen is zero.

Holden complains that "you only hear about" and don't see footage of Iggy rolling around in glass or vomiting. Maybe because these things happened forty years ago, much of the time in obscure venues and footage of it doesn't actually exist? Also - Jarmusch "inexplicably leaves out Iggy Pop’s solo career"... I think it's worth noting that the film is very deliberately about the band the Stooges, not about Pop's career. This seems like more a namecheck that he likes those records rather than a valid criticism. Whatever.

.....and you can listen to Iggy today and most Fridays on his weekly radio show, Iggy Confidential, which streams live on BBC6 Music Radio and can be accessed on the BBC Radio iPlayer app (available here in US).

Mr. Holden’s review of ‘Gimmie Danger’ misses the point of the film. It’s not a profile of Iggy Pop, it a film about The Stooges.

The film gives fascinating perspectives into what made their personalities tick and how they developed their sound. Iggy has always been the voice of the band, and here, thankfully, as the chief narrator of their story he does great justice to his bandmates. Jim Jarmusch does a masterful job of using the other voices within the Stooges family to tell the story without resorting to the usual trope of using well-meaning, but ultimately meaningless famous ‘talking heads’ to explain the band’s importance. It was especially wonderful to hear Ron and Scott Asheton’s sister Kathy give first person accounts. Mr. Holden is dismissive of the other band members interviews, but for a Stooges fan like myself it’s the reason the film carries so much weight.

Sure, it’s love-letter from Jarmusch to the band. Isn’t film meant to be a canvas for the director, not a critic’s formula that has to include every sordid detail of a person (“Iggy Pop is not shown vomiting onstage or rolling around on broken glass, both of which he was known to do.”) to prove that it’s not a hagiography? The complaint of not enough “drinking and drug taking, rampant sexual behavior or fights among the band” shows a limited view of what makes a band’s story interesting. The film ”inexplicably leaves out Iggy Pop’s solo career” because it’s, thankfully, a film is about THE STOOGES.