Courtesy Generation Indigo Films
Movies
Punk is littered with angry white men bemoaning the government, their sex lives and the general malaise and apathy inherent with youth. But when we look back over the storied genre’s icons, a deeper picture emerges of the women, people of color, queer folks, outsiders and general excellence that transcended demographics to write the histories. Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, aka Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, was one such outlier.
In the new-ish documentary I Am a Cliché—which was technically released in 2021, but last year’s movie schedules are a nightmare of weirdness thanks to COVID—punk fans finally get a look into the early days of the impactful musician and poet from her daughter, Celeste Bell, who bases the film on delving into her mother’s archives five years after she died. Amongst the punk-rock faithful, Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex are easily summonable entities, but the deeper stories behind a young biracial woman from Brixton (that’s in England) not only tees us up for a more complete appreciation of timeless songs like “Identity” and “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!,” it provides insight into the cultural elements, world forces and mental illnesses that propelled Elliott-Said into a world, Bell says, wherein she was famous but broke.
Being the daughter of a working class English woman and a nomadic Somali immigrant would have been enough to make anyone feel out of place, the film posits, thanks in part to immersive narration from Passing star Ruth Negga, whose blue collar British drawl brilliantly encapsulates Elliott-Said’s teenage poetry, unused lyrics and journal entries. Bell looks deeper, however, into how fame triggered her mother’s insecurities and also led to a bipolar breakdown in 1979, as well as how X-Ray Spex’s 1978 debut Germfree Adolescents burrowed into topics of racial identity, punk politics and good old-fashioned angst during the Roxy era of punk titans like Sex Pistols, Sham 69, The Clash and many (too many) more.
What sets I Am a Cliché apart from other films of its ilk, however, is its personal touch through Bell. Documentaries that focus on their makers can be problematic or, at least, lacking in objectivity. Here the narrative thrives with Bell’s perspective—a realistic one that readily humanizes a mythic music figure and through which Bell explores her mother’s post-fame struggles, time with Krishna Consciousness and a late-in-life reconciliation that spawned the 2011 Poly Styrene record Generation Indigo, complete with assistance from Bell herself. Elliott-Said would die of breast cancer that same year. So was her relationship with her daughter a good one? Not particularly, at least not until later in life, but interspersed audio interviews with X-Ray Spex bandmates and Poly Styrene’s friends, former lovers and other assorted musical heavies of the day seem to help Bell come to terms with her mother’s motivations; at the very least, she says, repairing that relationship before her mom died meant everything.
There’s wisdom in there, of course, and it’s a nice capper to an otherwise enjoyable documentary for fans of any music. This is a songwriter who launched a million poets, songwriters, bands, etc. As Pauline Black of The Selecter says in the doc, there are those who kicked down the doors for themselves, yes, but also for everyone behind them, and those doors stayed open. For that and a drove of other reasons, I Am a Cliché should be considered required viewing.
9
+X-Ray Spex still slay; fascinating
-Feels a little short
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche
Directed by Bell and Paul Sng
Center for Contemporary Arts, Apple TV, NR, 96 min.
