Charlie Is My Darling

The band is seen being shuttled to the gigs, preparing backstage, yawning, killing time, sleeping, and eventually playing onstage, to an accompaniment of their album hits, or orchestral rearrangements, or occasional non-synch live versions. The first show comes to an abrupt end when fans storm the stage and have to be cleared by security; the band has long since run for cover. Afterward, a medical team is seen toting someone away on a stretcher. Before the second show even begins, an ambulance is parked outside the hall.

The lack of synchronized live sound to match the concert footage is a major disappointment and the film's greatest drawback. More a 51-minute montage than a documentary, it's a jagged collection of grainy, handheld snippets and fragments, with songs and commentary starting and ending just as abruptly. The result may be willfully unprofessional, but it also imparts a certain seedy vigor that's entirely appropriate to the subject matter. And there's an undeniable charm to seeing the young band holed up in planes, trains, and hotel rooms, doing Elvis impressions, singing doo-wop or old music-hall songs to Keith Richards' guitar and piano; picking their noses and grinning at the camera; putting on makeup before a show--or is that acne cream? They're still kids here, playing relatively small auditoriums jammed with hysterical, screaming fans. Brief interview segments show drummer Charlie Watts to be virtually incoherent, uncomfortable, and unimaginative, while bassplayer Bill Wyman claims he's not a musician, he just plays in a band. Richards and singer Mick Jagger were clearly the brash media players even then, the publicity magnets, the court jesters. Guitarist Brian Jones comes off as the band's soft-spoken, sensitive soul, never more so than with the eerily prescient, "Let's face it: the future as a Rolling Stone is very uncertain." leave a comment