Killing Brian Jones

Stoned shoots for truth and hits itself in the foot.
by Eric Otto
Rating: 2 out of 5 reels

For many, Brian Jones was the style and soul of the Rolling Stones. Jones was not only a brilliant guitarist but also a fashionista in style-obsessed1960s London. But in death he was simply dismissed as a rock’n'roll fuck-up. In Stoned, director Stephen Woolley simply wants us to reconsider Jones as a sensitive man who couldn’t handle his drugs. As his angular girlfriend Anna admonishes him, “Keith can handle the drugs, but you can’t.” She is, of course, referring to Keith Richards who, like the rest of the Stones, remains window dressing while the production had to work around using original Stones songs. They’ve done an admirable job of mixing classic blues songs with some modern interpretations by contemporaries like the White Stripes, which points more to the Stones’ genesis than does Stoned. Woolley, an established producer, makes his directorial debut here focusing primarily on the relationship between Jones and contractor Frank Thorogood hired by then Rolling Stones road manager Tom Keylock. Thorogood’s 1993 deathbed confession to murdering Jones was a quiet coda in the Stones-Jones saga-blink and you would have missed it.

Jones, oddly, is played by Leo Gregory, who has the body of a linebacker, not the lithe, feminine frame of the blonde, mop-topped rocker. The film opens with Jones holed up in the cute estate once the haunt of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne. Puttering around an opiate haze of guitars and recording equipment, Jones lounges around in velvet pants with his oft-naked Swedish girlfriend Anna. Drugs amp Jones’ narcissism, and the air is thick with sex and narcotics, a gauzy reality that Stones manager Keylock stirs with the hiring of builder Thorogood (Paddy Considine) who is brought aboard to fulfill Jones’ vague ideas and keep an eye on the misfit rocker. Director Woolley cares deeply about period detail and gives great attention to psychedelic editing that plays with the palate of period drug films of the ’60s. He sets Jones up as a kindly but boring sod who gets off on sexual humiliation-often at the expense of Thorogood, representing the working class of a post-war Brittan whose fading generational power was being cuckolded by the gluttony of the new gen of rock’n'roll kids.

Stoned feels predetermined, rather than evolving towards Thorogood’s momentary loss of reason, and can’t seem to breach his sense of humiliation beyond a checklist of pokes and jokes. When Jones dismisses his services, Frank refuses to leave and generally makes an ass out of himself, instead of delivering a well-warranted stiff middle finger or a pop in the jaw. Thorogood’s home life with his wife is barely scratched, as is any experience outside of Poohville. Considine bares a resemblance to X punkster John Doe. It’s an unintentional coincidence, but is the kind of intriguing foreshadowing that would have given Stoned some curious layers. The film is best when it attempts to play generations against each other, but it never plunders the opportunity, instead playing to simple threatened masculinity issues. Whether Thorogood actually murdered Jones, or whether it was accidental mischief is speculative curiosity-we’re too far ahead of the incident to merely narrow our focus on a tabloid afterthought. John Ford once said that when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. In Stoned, they gunned for fact and lost sight of what’s more powerful: Brian Jones, the legend.   LAA

Rated R; Opens March 24 at Landmark’s Nuart Theater.