Kilmer's amazing performance saves the day, but only just!

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2007)

The story of the short - but influential - life of Jim Morrison and The Doors: who exploded on the music scene in the late 1960's and are still hugely popular today.
(As if you don't know all this already!)
The Doors were a fantastic group, and if you don't believe me just flick through a stranger's CD collection: There is usually a Doors compilation in their somewhere.
But what do you want to believe about the group itself and what they represented and what they believed in? This movie believes The Doors were Jim Morrison and a group of half-assed sidekick men and to hell with the fact that some of the better tunes were written by other band members or the overall (organ based) sound had little to do with Jim Boy.
Rock and roll cannot be encapsulated in two hours. All you can do is form lists and put lines through them one by one. Early life (lied about - by JM - because it didn't fit hippie fashion), form the band, band gets famous, band takes drugs, band falls out over drugs, you know the full list as well as I do - unless you are coming to rock movies for the first time.
The central problem I have is I don't like the stoned or the drunk. Indeed most sober people don't. I can't care less if the person that is drunk/stoned is very talented or has written great songs or even that they are sexy. They are bores and they are bores that urinate on the carpet. JM urinated on a lot of people's carpet and from his early death it is clear that as a drinker he was a bit of a lightweight.
(Often consumed - in the street fashion - straight from the bottle.)
When sober (more times than this movie acknowledges) he was a big reader and a smart enough guy, but rock doesn't like smart all that much. It much prefers extroverts with an inflated sense of their own importance and who die young enough to not embarrass the fans by their middle age or worse. As Bono once said "I don't want to be a firework that explodes for the enjoyment of the general public."
What holds this movie together is Val Kilmer. My word is he good. He looks Morrison, he acts Morrison and he sings Morrison. Nobody could be better. Even the original band were amazed. The concert scenes are so well created that they look like a documentary and - strange though it may sound - they should have recorded a full concert and put it out as an extra on the DVD. A new art form, a fictionalised version of a real 1960's gig.
Indeed, Kilmer is as strong as the other band members are weak. Indeed they are so weak they are almost extras in their own movie (the title is a con - this is Jimmy and the Whoever's!) Meg Ryan is a total miscast as his nagging wife and Billy Idol (who is called Cat in the movie) seems to need to shout things at random to remind people he is still there. If you can remember the names of the actors playing the other band members or recall a line they said you need to go on the road as Mr. Memory! However at times I don't know if they are angry at Morrison or their itchy wigs.
Narcotic taking (legal or illegal) is someone else's business. It is easy for me - as someone that views self-poisoning as the greatest form of madness on the planet - to claim to be moral superior just because it isn't my knee-jerk. However it does seem to work for artistic people, at least for a short while. It makes things better before it makes things much worse. And it doesn't get any worse than being in your grave at 27 - unless that is the place you want to be.
To love someone you have to love them when they are old, bald or grey. The fans that desecrate his grave (and those around it) at PerÃ¨ Lachaise in Paris (nothing like shown in this movie, by the way - look up the cemeteries own web site on Google) like him dead and buried. You don't even have to pay to be in his company. The Lizard King is dead, long live the next wandering poet and their entertaining and manic odes to their own self-pity...