January 29, 1999
By Ted Anthony
AP NATIONAL WRITER
On the surface, they're pretty distasteful - all of them. The boys from the glam-rock band ``Strange Fruit'' weren't all that easy on the eyes to begin with, and two post-breakup decades of aging and forlorn lives haven't made things any better.
Thus turns ``Still Crazy,'' a film a studio publicist billed - completely on the mark - as ``This Is Spinal Tap'' meets ``The Full Monty.'' Is it a comedy or a drama? No matter. Its schizophrenia serves it well, and it ends up a poignant treatise on aging and the dangers of instant gratification.
Tony (Stephen Rea), Strange Fruit's erstwhile keyboard player, is a man who wears Jimi Hendrix's tooth on a chain around his neck. He finds himself broke 21 years after the band's denouement at ``Wisbech,'' an open-air concert that was the pinnacle of 1970s performance rock. So he devises a scheme to get the group back together.
``You hated each other in the end,'' warns Karen, a groupie who essentially managed the band back in its glory days, and is now a mom pushing 40. But Tony goes off in search of his former chums, determined to orchestrate their resurrection.
There's Hughie (Billy Connolly), the roadie who misses the camaraderie. There's Les (Jimmy Nail), who has started his own roofing business but deeply misses the music. There's Beano (Timothy Spall), the overweight butt of jokes who is running from financial problems.
And finally there's Ray (Bill Nighy), the former lead singer and glam boy who attends AA meetings, is on Prozac and is alternately bullied and coddled by his wife Astrid (Helena Bergstrom). He's determined to show he's not too old to play the game.
At first, they manage to book a few nostalgia gigs. Their premiere, aboard a boat in Holland, is disastrous. But as they play together, the music they loved resurfaces - as does the arguing that tore Strange Fruit asunder in the first place.
``Still Crazy'' is essentially a buddy flick, full of sexual jokes and tour-bus flatulence and reminiscences of glory days. But something deeper is at play.
Much of what motivates the band is the premature deaths of their two mates, Keith and Brian. They idolize Brian (Bruce Robinson, who looks more like a glam-rock star than most real glam-rock stars), and their quest to understand what happened to him and preserve his memory acts as a metaphor for lost youth.
Rarely is the rock scene examined from the vantage point of aging performers, and attention to this keeps ``Still Crazy'' from stumbling into the mediocrity that its first 20 minutes foreshadows. All the men, and Karen as well, are living lives they feel are far inferior to the days when thousands of screaming youths would cheer their music. But it's a young man's game.
This hits Ray hardest; as the reunion tour progresses, he applies more makeup (Ziggy Stardust meets Gene Simmons) and grows ever more cadaverous as he struggles to recapture something he never quite defined in the first place.
``The tragedy of people like me,'' he says, ``is our lives peak too early.''
The music of Strange Fruit, written for the film by Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford and musicians Mick Jones of Foreigner and Jeff Lynne of ELO, is surprisingly memorable and will probably make for a good-selling soundtrack.
Through an adept balance of absurdist humor (Ray attends an AA meeting in Dutch, which turns out to be Overeaters Anonymous) and melancholy for a youth forever lost, ``Still Crazy'' succeeds, in no small part due to exceptional performances by Nail and Nighy. This is the story of the Stones and Kinks and Kisses who weren't.
The raucous music may not be to everyone's taste, but when Karen says, ``I wanna stand in the dark and see an audience feel the way I do,'' you'll know just what she means.
``Still Crazy'' is directed by Brian Gibson from a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. It is a Columbia-TriStar release.
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