Great Performance in great, but flawed film

Rating: 8/10 (15 December 2015)

I want to add a few words, because reading many of the reviews, it's apparent that many did not get the message of the film or who Morrison was and Val Kilmer tried to be.
The Morrison of the film was a Dionysius-figure. Dionysius was a god of the ancient Greeks who was honored by rites in which people went wild for a prescribed period of time. It was kind of like the modern New Years Eve or the New Orleans Mardi Gras, or a wild rock festival, but in context of religious rites.
Morrison's books at the beginning of the film show that he was media savvy before becoming famous. It's in the original script, but was unfortunately cut out of the film. He very much wanted to get power as the native-American shamans did, through ritual, drugs, dance and trance.
All the fore-mentioned, except the holidays, are a part of religious practice. In the film, Morrison tells his friend that "people want something sacred". He was trying to introduce that into the rock music of the time, while most other white musicians were ripping off licks of the black bluesmen. That's why he was such a sensation at the time, because he was so different.
Questions as to whether Kilmer/Morrison were nice guys, did too many drugs, and so on, are totally beside the point. What Morrison wanted was for everyone to lose their rational, everyday mentality for a sacred trance, a druggy religiosity... anything but what was evident in the 60s, i.e. Viet Nam, poverty, racism, and people choosing sides in a political struggle inside the US. The 60s must be seen in relation to what came before, the Eisenhower 50s, a time of plenty, but of little progress on any other front, especially music, except for black music.
Oliver Stone does a good job of getting these messages across. The middle sections of the film are the best, the concert scenes, the confrontation with the East Coast establishment, the excess in life, art and substances. Btw, excess in these items was and is still considered one of the ways to knowledge, believe it or not.
Hats off to Val Kilmer for his wonderfully talented impersonization of Jim Morrison. A great performance, probably the greatest of his career. He walks, talks and sings the songs as Morrison did. Read more about the film if you want to know how hard Kilmer and Stone prepared for the role. Read the original script to get more background to what the film says, because a lot of context didn't make it into the film.
Finally, it's great to go back to a time when things were more free, more uninhibited, before people were hung up in digital toys trance, as they are now. Nothing as strong is going on now. The 60s will return in a different form, as will all the other eras, as they have for millenia.