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Starring Jack White and his sister, Meg
Y
Christmas at Cinema’s was business as usual. Comedy was half-cut by eleven, tripping over the table cloth while attempting to scream at the ceiling about how funny he was this time, Indie and Arthouse pulling him back and telling him to shut up; Blockbuster was sat in the big chair in the corner, smoking a Havana and giving them that look that meant he was threatening to cut them off. Period-Drama shrieked and tittered at his poorly scripted quip, before looking down sadly at her reflection in the ashtray and thinking how old she looked. Late again, Music Documentary sighed as he turned away from the window, flicked up his collar and slowly wandered off into the rain. Poor bastard has to work extra hard, pull every stylistic trick and quirk in his repertoire to get a fraction of the other’s meat. Because he’s different. He’s specialist. Music documentary has a tragic case of aggressive limited appeal.
A sobbing shame, because whatever you think, or completely fail to care to think about Jack White, man and music, he’s unarguably one of the few modern uber-buskers to earn the batted-about term of ‘rock star’. A frighteningly streamlined collision of talent and drive has culminated in a walking, guitar-lacerating embodiment of old fashioned blues and Warhol-level stylistic tropes, wrapped up in a seven foot tall red-clad doll of porcelain skin and scarecrow wig hair. He’s a terrifying man, a more terrifying star, a true enigma in an age of playing chum-buckets with your idols. Though seemingly a documentary, this isn’t a film about reveals, rather it’s another product of the singular vision that Jack White has brought to his life and career, all blacks, whites and reds, fuzzy cuts and oblique quotes. Any fan looking for gossip and rumour behind the three colour genius of his meticulous art-block-barrier will stomp off disappointed, but for anyone else in the world with a pulse that beats to a rhythm the film serves as a timeless portrait of an artist on top form, a demented screaming beast of a showman who seems to be channeling eight generations of dead bluesmen through his head at the same time, shuddering and screeching as he blasts them out through his throat and fingers. Musically it’s incredible; White Stripes shows seem to be entirely built of those tiny moments in other gigs where your favourite band deviates slightly for a fraction of a second during a song, when the world comes alive and your heart races at how much you love them. This is nothing new. There’s no doubting that the man is a genius, one of the few in the history of the medium to ever hold the title, and the film does a nice job at saluting him and bolstering the legend. But the real meat, red and dripping, comes straight from the eyes of his beloved ‘sister’ Meg. As the film progresses it centers more and more on her, the camera gazing intently as she listlessly peers from windows and across arctic beaches, cigarette fuzzing down, saying nothing. Humanity trickles out of the film whenever they share an interview, the strange glances and suppressed giggles suggesting a childish game being played on a global scale, a private joke stretched to a decade-long career. By the end it’s almost entirely Meg’s show as emotion begins to mix with the music, not the wall-cracking intensity of Jack’s blood squall guitars but something smaller and quieter, a tear on a piano pedal. Being the greatest bluesman of the modern age guarantees some soul; the man clearly breathes and pisses music every second of the day, and as musical portrait it’s something to be kept in a box and treasured. But the film goes some way to revealing that it’s Meg White who is something different, something smaller and greater. She’s his heart.
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