Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
Directed by Julien Temple (Not Rated)
The Clash’s frontman is remembered, warts and all.
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.
****
The Clash’s defiant frontman, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 2002, is “startlingly present” in Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, said Jim Ridley in The Village Voice. Scrawny, raucous, and endlessly rooting for the underdog, Strummer was a middle-class hero, who “didn’t so much embody punk as transcend it.” Similarly, director Julien Temple’s high-octane rockumentary surpasses the average biopic, taking an intensive look at the rock legend. He captures Strummer’s presence in “a kind of free-associative context” of concert clips, radio broadcasts, and old conversations, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. His life, as told in the montage-style of The Future Is Unwritten, is “history, criticism, philosophy, and politics played fast and loud.” Temple, who first began documenting the Clash in 1976, follows the band through its rise, triumph, and eventual dissolution. The result is a good, bad, and uncut portrayal of Strummer, offering “an intimacy that’s rare to encounter in rock docs,” said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. The Future Is Unwritten recalls a bygone era when a rock star “could burn—and even burn out— brightly” but proves Strummer is a relentless force that will never fade away.
