Musicians in Movies: Performance (Dir Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1h45m, 1970)

Like no other rock band, The Rolling Stones are quintessentially cinematic. That goes not only for their long-running relationship with Martin Scorsese, beginning with 1972's Mean Streets, where Robert De Niro's Danny Boy storms into cinema accompanied with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and has continued ever since, the group giving voice to triumph, nervous breakdowns and things spiralling out of control to "Gimme Shelter", but across cinema in general, from Apocalypse Now to Knives Out to The Royal Tennenbaums. The Stones themselves have a certain cinematic coolness, at least in their late 1960s to mid 1970s prime, becoming - largely Jagger and Richards-focused - the muses for directors from Jean Luc Godard to Kenneth Anger. This is not to mention the inevitable on-the-road documentaries that run the gamut from harrowing - 1970's Gimme Shelter, in which the nightmarish chaos of Altamont brings the curtain down on the 1960s - to curiously safe - Scorsese's own Shine a Light (2006).

The Stones as actors is an altogether sparser and rockier road: Richards' acting appearances run to a brief cameo in Volker Schlöndorff's Man on Horseback (1969) and as father to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow in two of the amiable Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, Depp having stolen the entire kohled stumbling affair from Richards in the first place. Jagger is little different; the roles he nearly played, Feyd Rautha in Jodorowsky's never made Dune and a supporting character in Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1981) more interesting than his bit parts and occasional cameos in films every so often, and his mumbling, disconnected title performance in Ned Kelly (1970). All of this would be a mere sideshow to the Stones soundtracking cinema, were it not for Performance, (1970) in which Mick Jagger's thinly fictionalised out-there rockstar plays foil to James Fox's gangster, as the optimism and freedom of the 1960s rots into the chaos and darkness of the 1970s.

Donald Cammell is by far one of the most interesting figures I will ever discuss on this blog, and it is by his hand that Performance takes shape: from a bohemian and occultist background that would include family friend Aleister Crowley - Cammell would later appear alongside Mick Jagger's brother and Marianne Faithful in Anger's Lucifer Rising (1972) - Cammell would break into screenwriting after heading to Paris. From here, writing the screenplay for both The Touchables and caper Duffy, featuring a young actor called James Fox, so Cammell would become friends with Anita Pallenberg, and from here enter the orbit of her friends, and travel back to England at the height of the Swinging 60s, a scene that Cammell was now disillusioned with.

From here what would eventually become Performance takes shape. Originally a romp starring Marlon Brando, influenced by the French New Wave, Cammell's disdain for the Swinging London films, typified by Alfie  and Kaleidoscope (both 1966) and the introspection of Jorge Luis Borges, the film became more cerebral, more intense, Brando replaced by Fox, who would proceed to disappear into London's criminal underworld for several months. Joining Cammell as co-director would be Nicolas Roeg, already a veteran of Lawrence of Arabia as second unit director, and cinematographer for both Roger Corman and Francois Truffaut, whilst Stones hanger on, Jack Nitzsche, later to soundtrack The Exorcist, would pull together a scratch band including Ry Cooder and Moog player, Bernard L. Krause, who gives the film's score its unsettling electronic undertones. 

By the time that Jagger's Turner appears in the film proper, nearly an hour in, we have already spent a great deal of time in one underworld, and are about to enter another. Fox's gangster, Chas, has swept through the film with violence and force, his gangland enforcer at turns a brute and a curiously fluid figure, his masculinity as performative as the androgyny of the rockstar he will soon become entangled with. Fox has disappeared into the role, and into the violence of London; we see his rivalry with another figure in a rival East London gang, Maddocks, spiral out of control despite the express instructions of his superiors, including Harry Flowers (boxer, Fox's trainer and first-time actor, Johnny Shannon), which leads to escalating explosions of violence and to Fox's torture by, and the eventual death of, Maddock. 

Heavily influencing this half of the film is the figure of gangster and celebrity fixer, David Litvinoff, as much a hanger-on to celebrities such as the Stones as a criminal who rubbed shoulders with the Krays to the degree he was saved from their wrath and merely left tied upside down in the window of a house in Kensington not far from where Performance was filmed. It is his shadowy figure-his role in honing the film's dialogue and influencing the feel of the film permeates almost every inch of the film, not only in its scenes of gangsterism, but what is to come. Arriving in the house of reclusive rockstar, Turner, so we are confronted with a very different underground, that of the counterculture, the 1960s peace and love curdled into the contents a grubby dilapidated pile in Notting Hill Gate. 

Its denizens, the ménage a trois of Turner, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton), soon become more than a simple repudiation of the Summer of Love. Jagger, though playing a thinly fictionalised version of himself, has lost none of his on-stage charisma, the film regarded by some as an unfolding of Jagger's private life, complete with Pallenberg's on-camera drug-taking and on-screen sex, the latter leading Keith Richards (Pallenberg's partner at that point) to break off working on the film's soundtrack and to lurk outside the filming location in his car for the rest of the film's production). Turner is also the perfect foil to the ultra-masculine Chas; their first meeting is adversarial, the rockstar dismissive of Chas's cover story as a juggler in demand and his hastily dyed hair which lends to some stark and beautiful shots from Roeg of red trails down Fox's face.

Soon though, we arrive at the real treatise of the film, the chamleonic shift of both of its major characters to resemble one another, Chas' experimentation coming as the film becomes more outlandish and he is drugged with magic mushrooms in an attempt to "go much further, much further back! And faster" as Turner puts it. It is easy to read this as an indictment or a embracing of the 1960s' sexual - and gender - experimentation, a mystic travel through the self, an occult-tinged dive into the performative shared hinterland of gangster masculinity and rockstar sensuality, an attempt to follow the Beatles into movie stardom gone horribly wrong (or right).All of this, from Jagger strumming away at Robert Johnson's "Come on in My Kitchen", to his reading from Marco Polo of the Hashishi, and the film's wide cultural canvas - much of this preoccupied, as the film's tagline and Jagger both observe, with madness and death. As Turner puts it, echoing Artaud "The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness". 

And, with a burst of static, with Turner wielding a lighting tube, with the white noise and burbling bass of Krause's Moog, Turner makes it. Jagger makes it, transformed to a slick East London gangster, Chas mirrored back, to deliver "Memo From Turner", and birth the music video as we know it. It is at once a surreal trip of a movie, and a premonition - despite being shot in 1968, it would release after Jagger's turn in Ned Kelly in 1970 - of what was to come at Altamont and beyond. It is at once a mirror to the end of the 1960s, held up to transform and distort the age as much as reflect it, as Pherber does with Chas, and a culmination of all its myriad pieces. 

There is no film like Performance, as it depicts the end of the 1960s and foretells the beginning of the 1970s, no film that depicts the sex and drugs and rock and roll and the gangsters who made much of that possible, and the changing nature of Swinging London like it, and at its centre is Mick Jagger and the ultimate 1960s portrait of the rockstar. 

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Performance is available via DVD from  ‎ Warner Bros. Home Ent and streaming from AppleTV

Next week, to Scorsese's portrait of a woman caught between ambition and reality, and between the loss of her husband and the arrival of Kris Kristofferson's everyman in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.