A biopic can’t help treating its protagonists as exceptional figures-stars commanding the stage of History-in a way that undercuts the iconoclastic, “no more heroes” spirit of punk. A doc like the recent Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, which was directed by her daughter Celeste Bell and Paul Sng, offers both the excitement of watching the X-Ray Spex singer smash through barriers in historical real-time and the poignant backstory of her struggles as a parent.īut arguably the best punk movies are stories that tap into the spirit of the time through imagined characters and invented situations. That’s where documentaries, whether fly-on-wall time capsules or reconstructions woven from archival footage and recollections, win out. Witness the derisive howls that greeted preview glimpses of Pistol, Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols series for FX, which debuts in May-the kids looked too winsomely cute to pass for Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. This applies as much to anti-charisma as conventional attractiveness.
