When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors

Directed by Tom DiCillo Club IFI, Dublin, 90 min

MAYBE WE ARE ready for a documentary on The Doors. Enough time has, surely, elapsed for the stench around Oliver Stone’s absurd biopic to dissipate. Yes, indeed. A sober, measured assessment of the Beatnik Stones sounds like a good idea.

Sadly, this is not that film. Narrated with near-psychotic reverence by Johnny Depp – imagine a state-sponsored study of Kim Il Jong – When You're Strangeonly serves to make Jim Morrison seem like more of a pretentious boob than he already appeared.

“By 16, Morrison was already reading Nietzsche, Camus and Rimbaud,” Johnny intones as if this distinguished the young Jim from any other deluded half-bright teenager. Later on Depp explains how, unencumbered by image manipulators, he actually chose his trademark leather pants unaided. That’s right, Morrison was such a genius he could buy his own trousers.

To be fair, composed entirely of archive footage, devoid of any contemporary interviews, Tom DiCillo's film does offer Doors fans many engaging sequences of their heroes in action. The footage of the band singing Touch Mewith full lounge-lizard brass accompaniment is priceless. The versions of The Endremind us how much fun can be generated by speed-reading the dust-jacket blurb for a Freud biography.

But the film is so criminally lacking in humour that (ironically) you are never more than a minute away from the next outbreak of unintentional hilarity. The recurrent excerpts from the subject’s notoriously onanistic verse-catastrophes undermine the frequent suggestions that he should really have “concentrated on his poetry”. Indeed, the film inadvertently suggests that Morrison’s scrawls may have constituted, after the plays “what” Ernie Wise wrote, the second most misguided literary sideline in entertainment history.

Listening to the absurd argument that The Doors' tunes offer "music for the strange" – and remembering that every golfer has a copy of LA Womanin his BMW – one can't help but wish that the film allowed the band just a degree of self-awareness. A decade later, Joy Division wrote lyrics every bit as pretentious but they were always able to laugh at themselves.

An extravagantly botched opportunity.