Review: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

“Hippie and punk are different stations on the same railroad.” That’s Julien Temple’s take on the conflicting ideologies, and that seems to be the central theme of Joe Strummer’s life.

With The Future is Unwritten, Temple has produced a brilliant documentary about the life of Joe Strummer of The Clash, and later of the Mescaleros. Combining footage he shot back in the 70s during the rise with campfire interviews with just about everyone who had something to say about him, Temple has even interspersed animations based on Strummer’s own drawings to create a fluid portrait of the mockingly self-proclaimed “punk rock warlord.”

Born in Turkey and brought up as a diplomat’s son, he didn’t stay in one country very long as a lad, and when he did find stability, it was in the smothering public school system in England. All of this contributed to his early days in a community of hippie squatters who eventually gathered up to form a band called The 101ers, back when he was calling himself Woody. Futzing around with a ukelele brought about the name Joe Strummer, and futzing around with the 101ers brought about Bernie Rhodes and Mick Jones, who convinced him to leave the hippies behind and punk out with the Clash, who didn’t really punk out until the Sex Pistols showed them the way.

The Sex Pistols connection helps explain Temple’s involvement - he made two renowned documentaries about them - The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury. It’s interesting to note that the Clash years don’t even make up half of the entire film, ostensibly because Temple wasn’t interested in making a film rehashing what everyone knows. Instead, he delves more into the hippie life before and, perhaps surprisingly, the hippie life that came after the band dissolved, once they got embarrassed by their success, fell into every rock star pitfall while becoming the pop stars they sought to destroy.

Further challenging the audience is Temple’s refusal to ID any of the people he gathered together to have campfire conversations, which were a big part of Strummer’s later years. Temple said it would be too jarring to throw name tags on the screen, and that “if you don’t annoy the audience, there’s no fun.”

It is a bit of a challenge, because when fellow Clash member Mick Jones shows up, he’s almost unrecognizable. Temple says he “looks like the Prime Minister of Chechnya,” with his nearly bald head. Clashmate Topper Headon also took part and told an interesting story about how ugly things got toward the end of the Clash’s run. Headon explains that he essentially wrote everything but the lyrics for their biggest hit, “Rock the Casbah,” and then was kicked out of the band for his drug addiction right before the record was released. Paul Simonon didn’t participate, although Temple said he wavered back and forth on the project before backing out.

Just because there are no titles identifying the people sharing stories about Strummer doesn’t mean we can’t recognize any of them. The breadth of participants is impressive - John Cusack, Bono, Flea, Anthony Kiedis, Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp, Matt Dillon, Courtney Love, Jim Jarmusch, and Steve Buscemi, and that’s not a complete list by any means.

Joe Strummer was a complex and interesting man. He left behind a lot of friends when he put himself into the punk mold but, as Temple said after the screening, he ’smuggled in’ a lot of his hippie values in the process. He pushed his band to be successful, but felt it ruined the point of the band once they were no longer on the same level as their audience. Once the Clash ended, it took him about ten years in the ‘wilderness’ to get to the point where he could really make music again, and he spent most of that time raising his kids and traveling the world just to reconnect with people. He wept when he saw that soldiers during the first Gulf War were writing “Rock the Casbah” onto bombs before dropping them.

Then, just as he was revitalizing himself by joining up with the Mescaleros to produce new music with widespread influences from around the world, he suddenly died of a heart defect no one knew he had, and it hit everyone around him really hard. Temple said he was just getting to know Strummer well, and part of the impetus to make the film was to help himself come to terms with losing him. This is evidenced by what he said to the audience before the screening of the film.

“I hope you like it, but I don’t really care. I made it for Joe.”