Rock Spirits

...For example, an actress would be hard put to star in a genuine biography of Janis Joplin (who could match the late singer's histrionics...

...The Rose could be one more version of .1 Star is Born, most recently made by Barbra Streisand, with Kris Kristoffer-son as the doomed rock star...

...He storms out, plows his scooter across a flower bed, then crashes through a picket fence in an explosion of anger...

...Watching that sequence, I remembered seeing The Who end their performance at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit by playing "My Generation" and then smashing their instruments to pieces on stage (the customary closing of their concerts in those days...

...But shifting the emphasis to the life stories of musicians raises the question of believability...

...The only real surprise is her ability to belt out a song at an outdoor concert just before expiring on stage from a lethal combination of alcohol and drugs...

...The Buddy Molly Story, for one, seemed at best to be a whitewashed account of the singer's career, although it was partly redeemed-As drama-by Gary Busey's performance in the title role...

...At least Midler is actually a singer, so she doesn't suffer some of the difficulties Busey did as Holly...

...The basic story of Quadrophenia could have made for simply an English version of all those rebellious-youth-in-search-of-identity movies that were so popular in this country in the 1950s (like Rebel Without a Cause) and are now making a comeback...

...Near the beginning of the film, Jimmy discovers that a long-lost friend (Raymond Winstone) has become a Rocker...

...What gives Quadrophenia an edge and elevates the material above the social realist pathos of its predecessors is The Who...

...On the one hand, throughout the film we are supposed to believe that The Rose is a displaced Southerner whose musical roots are in blues and country-and-western...

...But shortly afterward Jimmy is arrested, and Steph and most of his gang desert him...

...the title refers to the protagonist's four-way personality, symbolically split among the four members of the band (Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwhistle, and Keith Moon...

...When the Mods crash a party in a "respectable" neighborhood, Jimmy catches a glimpse of a life beyond his parents' reach and a girl (Steph, played by Leslie Ash) seemingly beyond his own grasp...

...First Jimmy, then the rest of the gang, and finally the other partygoers are swept up by the music...

...the Beatles were the gods and Bob Dylan the prophet, but The Who were the alter egos of a largely inarticulate generation whose scrambled and strangled sentiments would have gone unspoken without them...

...the two pathetically discuss the necessity of joining a gang to "be somebody...

...When Daltrey sputtered and stuttered through the verses of "My Generation" (in a brilliant marriage of singing style and lyrics) or apologetically proclaimed that "The Kids Are Alright," the piercing attack of Townshend's guitar, the throbbing urgency of Entwhistle's bass, and the crazed intensity of Moon's drumming all added up to the perfect and violent expression of the nihilistic potential of rock music and its audience—us...

...Nevertheless, the rivalry is all the more poignant for what the gangs have in common...

...Forrest continues to expand the range that was apparent the first time I saw him, in When the Legends Die, where he vividly portrayed a resentful and rebellious Indian...

...Although the group appears only once (Jimmy watches them perform on television), their distinctive music sets the tone of the film-in more ways than one...

...and if the character were fictionalized to boot, she would be twice removed from the impact made by the real-life performer...

...The movie begins with the singer trying to convince her hard-hearted manager (Alan Bates) that she needs a break from her grinding life on the road...

...Frustrated by their lack of access to the excitement, glamor, pleasure, and affluence promised by a society in the throes of a rebellion against its own traditions, and caught in the decade's cultural maelstrom, the Mods and Rockers are liberated from everything but their working- and lower-middle-class origins-And a rage that finds its futile expression in sex and violence...

...His Dyer is a quietly anguished good old boy whose deep reserves of decency and strength are as understated as The Rose's desperation and self-destructiveness are exaggerated...

...But Quadrophenia has none of the phony sentiment of The Wanderers or the hyper-estheticism of The Warriors...

...The latest exception is Quadrophenia, loosely based on the 1973 "rock opera" written and recorded (but never performed in concert) by The Who...

...If The Rose were better written, scored and acted, its scope would still be too limited by its focus on the life of a singer who could easily be any other kind of entertainer without changing the plot or characters much...

...The leading character has been changed from the somewhat ethereal hero of the opera to a mid-1960s malcontent English teenager whose contradictory loyalties perfectly symbolize the cultural conflicts of that decade...

...Little of the film captures the distinctive rock ethos-the revolution in sensibility in everything from hairstyles to politics...

...This anarchic energy of rock and the vulnerability of teenagers to it in the '60s are what Quadrophenia is all about, and only The Who-spokesmen for a truly lost generation-could have brought it off...

...Soon after the Mods crash that party, Jimmy-in a paroxysm of frustration after seeing Steph with another boy-yanks the Cascades' sappy ballad "Rhythym of the Rain" off the record player and puts on "My Generation," full blast...

...and American Graffiti, in which the music was not just a soundtrack but an essential clement of the characters' lives...

...Jimmy (Phil Daniels, who looks like a young Townshend) is by day a mail clerk in a dead-end job with an advertising agency and by night a Mod, cruising with his gang in search of girls, pills and the Rockers-their hated rivals...

...Finished with the fashions, bored with hate and passion," Jimmy dumps the motorcycle he has stolen from a once-admired Mod leader (played by Sting, lead singer of the Police) into the sea...

...Initially, the clash between gangs and with the local bobbies gives him an exciting sense of his identity as a Mod...

...at the same time, we are expected not to blink an eye when one of her favorite old stomping grounds turns out to be a transvestite bar in Greenwich Village...

...The greatest damage is suffered by Jimmy...

...That is the basic shortcoming of The Hose, featuring Bette Midler, loosely modeled after Joplin...

...To be sure, there have been numerous documentaries about festivals (like Woodstock) and rock musicians at work (The Band in The Last Waltz...

...Sporting their pompadours, studded leather jackets and stripped-down BSAs and Triumphs, the Rockers occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from the Mods, with their Beatle haircuts, tailored suits, and Lambrettas and Vespas laden with bizarre chrome superstructures of mirrors, windshields and stepped saddles...

...Back when I was playing bass in a rock band and riding a BSA (no Lambretta for me...

...Rod-dam's gritty direction places the film squarely in the tradition of the English realists contemporary with the story...

...it is a drama with a screenplay by Dave Humphries, Martin Stellman and Franc Roddam (who also directed), set to a revised treatment of The Who's score...

...Later, in what is apparently a dramatization of actual history, the Mods and Rockers converge on Brighton, a seaside resort as unprepared for them as Daytona and Fort Lauderdale customarily were during the same period for American college students on spring break...

...When he finally gets out of jail and makes his way home, he discovers that his one moment of existential awareness was really "just a giggle" to Steph and his Mod friends, who were inconstant comrades in battle and not even allies in his war for identity...

...Since we already know (although no one in the film seems to) that it's lonely at the top and that success has its price, we are hardly surprised when The Rose comes to an untimely end after too much livin', lovin', drinkin', and dopin...

...The gathering is quickly transformed...

...The original version was the group's disappointing follow-up to their successful Tommy...

...In a bizarre counterpoint, Bates grunts in a thick English accent that is totally out of place and unaccounted for in the story...

...Yet the blessing is mixed, at best, since Midler also has a well-defined stage persona-the campy queen of the homosexual baths scene-that results in an utterly improbable mixing of musical modes...

...Nor are matters helped by Midler's accent, which wavers between pseudo-black and phony Southern before lapsing into authentic New York...

...True, attempts to present the larger rock culture on film have tended to be either simple-minded youth flicks or message movies that merely use the music for its visceral impact...

...In fact, with the sexes reversed...

...Easy Rider, a "biker" that roared beyond its conventions to the beat of Steppen-vvolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Band, and other rock luminaries...

...Only Frederic Forrest, as Dyer, the awol GI who is The Rose's chauffeur-turned-lover, looks and sounds right...

...In its new incarnation, Quad-rophenia is not an opera anymore...

...The excursion ends in a full-scale riot that leaves both Mods and Rockers lying battered and bloody on the local beaches and in the town jail...

...Another serious problem with The Rose is a plot that never transcends the cliches of the showbiz saga...

...And fictional or semi-fictional stories are even more problematic...

...A few exceptions, however, do come to mind: A Hard Day's Night, in which Richard Lester's lively direction was the perfect correlative to the spirited music and personalities of the Beatles...

...As one of the three soldiers who latch onto the singer's entourage (including a loyal, silent type -A direct steal from Nashville), Forrest brings to life the polar opposite of the fearful, frenetic cook he played in Apocalypse Now...

...To underscore this exhilaration, Roddam stages a stunning sequence that captures the erotic link between sex and rage: At the height of the battle, Jimmy sneaks off to a deserted alley to make frenetic love to Steph, who surrenders less to him than to her own fascination with violence...

...Truth and drama almost inevitably clash, even in more or less straightforward biographies...

...In fact, he is the best thing about the whole movie...