When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors

Directed by Tom DiCillo

(R)

**

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

While the career and music of Jim Morrison and the Doors are “worth revisiting,” Tom DiCillo’s documentary isn’t worth seeing, said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. The frontman of the 1960s rock band was a “star of impossible magnetism,” but When You’re Strange fails to say anything new about this enigmatic character or his place in rock history. DiCillo approaches Morrison with the “glazed eyes of a true fan,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. Though his film offers a trove of never-before-seen footage, it also sags under worshipful narration and clichéd scenes of the era. DiCillo doesn’t even bother interviewing the band’s surviving members, exploring Morrison’s troubled relationship with his father, or investigating his baffling death in Paris, in 1971. Preferring the rock-god myth to the facts of the man’s life, the director fails to “frame the Doors properly,” said Noel Murray in the A.V. Club. Fortunately, he doesn’t shortchange the actual music. Listening to Ray Manzarek’s keyboards, John Densmore’s jazz-influenced drums, and Robby Krieger’s “flamenco-goes-pop guitar”—as well as to Morrison’s vocals—helps explain why the legacy of this short-lived band endures.