★★★★☆
“I like your name,” said David Bowie when he first met Mick Rock. “It can’t be real.” Well it was, and Rock would more than live up to it. The London-born music photographer became known as the Man Who Shot the Seventies, a Zelig-like snapper whose images of Bowie, Queen, Blondie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed (he was responsible for the iconic covers of Reed’s Transformer and the Stooges’ Raw Power) helped to define a decade in all its Stygian glamour.
“David says you see him as he sees himself,” Bowie’s manager once told Rock. No objective detachment here, then: Rock was an unashamed insider, “a Josef Goebbels”, as he puts it with one of his lurid flourishes. Not that he’s afraid of disagreeing with superstars: there is fascinating audio footage of conversations with Reed in which he he acts, and is treated, like an absolute equal.
Subtitled The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock, this documentary is colossally pretentious. We get Rock reading passages by Rimbaud in French, doing yoga standing on his head and saying things such as, “Photography wandered idly into my life”, and, “The lysergic experience opened up my third eye”.
Directed by Barnaby Clay, who has done music videos for Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, the film is also thoroughly entertaining. Rock really puts his countercultural money where his mouth is — this is a man who was as rock’n’roll as his subjects, who looked like them (skinny, long hair, tight jeans) and who had an ego that was every bit as big.
“What’s my name, Lenny?” he rasps with narcissistic glee during one shoot with Lenny Kravitz. There’s something preposterous, but seductive about the character Rock creates for himself: an assassin with a camera. “I’m not after your soul,” he says. “I’m after your f***ing aura.”
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Cocaine, unsurprisingly, became a staple for Rock, who used to trade his work with drug dealers: one of his prints for an eighth of an ounce. His post-shoot benders became legendary; he once went for a week without sleep. “Mick takes great pictures,” Carly Simon said. “But you can’t find him after the session for days.”
As he tells us several times, Rock is also a Cambridge graduate, and he certainly has a more vivid way with words than your average photographer, memorably comparing Iggy Pop to “a f***ing iguana”. He also has a colourful range of references: his famous shot for the cover of Queen II, with the band members’ faces lit from below and arranged in a diamond, was inspired by one of Marlene Dietrich.
As pseud-y as it often is, Clay’s film doesn’t shy away from the dark phases of Rock’s career: the huge heart attack that almost killed him; the times when his wild reputation eclipsed his talent and the phone stopped ringing. There is something quite sad, as well as self-aware, about Rock’s vampiric dependence on the people he photographs (“All of them had become a little bit of me”).
There’s no footage, not even a mention, of his wife and daughter. He probably prefers it that way; this is very much a portrait of a man at work — and play. With Rock, the two are thoroughly intertwined.
15, 98min
