Caution advised

Rating: 6/10 (10 October 2007)

I think I'd give this a miss unless you are a fan. I feel that given the plaudits it is earning it is overrated.
It looks great and central performances are superb, particularly Samantha Morton and Toby Kebbell as the wise-cracking band manager.
Against it was a second hour that dragged, particularly because predictable key scenes played out without much imagination; the birth of Curtis's daughter, his wife confronting him about his infidelity and his wife's discovery of his body.
I felt it didn't really add anything to the idea that having epilepsy in the 1970s was a bad thing, depression is a bad thing and that marrying young then falling in love with someone else is a bad thing. Worst of all it draws to a close as some kind of weird suicide porn, meticulously detailing his humdrum last hours for no apparent purpose other than to allow a little more build up to the suicide that all cinema-goers knew was coming before they bought the ticket. In the end I felt that rather than great cinema it was an ad-man's technically skillful but artistically bankrupt treatment of a biography.