Movie Review
★★★
GIMME DANGER
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Starring Iggy Pop. At Kendall Square. 108 minutes. R (drug content, language, Xtreme showmanship)
Here are some interesting nuggets of trivia we learn in “Gimme Danger,’’ Jim Jarmusch’s fond documentary ode to Iggy and the Stooges.
• Iggy, born James Osterberg Jr. in 1947 in Muskegon, Mich., cites TV comedian Soupy Sales, who urged kids to write letters “25 words or less,’’ as a pioneering influence on the lyrics of such terse proto-punk classics as “I Wanna Be Your Dog’’ and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell.’’
• Iggy grew up in a motor home just like the one in the 1953 Lucille Ball movie “The Long, Long Trailer.’’ “I got to know my parents, and that’s a treasure,’’ he tells Jarmusch.
• He bought the dog collar he wore onstage from a Los Angeles pet store called the Bowzer Boutique.
• An early appreciation of Yul Brynner in “The Ten Commandments’’ led to Iggy’s decision to go bare-chested in concert. “Rameses didn’t wear a shirt,’’ he says. (True, but he didn’t stage-dive or roll around on broken bottles, either.)
• Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton once called up Moe Howard of the Three Stooges to ask if it was OK for the group to use the name. The aging comedian said, “I don’t give a [expletive] what you call yourselves as long as it’s not the Three Stooges,’’ and hung up.
• After signing the Stooges to David Bowie’s Main Man label, producer Tony DeFries told Iggy he saw him as a rock ’n’ roll Peter Pan. Iggy replied, “No, no, Tony, I’ve got to be Manson.’’ Not long after, Main Man suspended the singer for “moral turpitude.’’
So, yes, lots of fun in this documentary if you believe — as do Jarmusch and this critic and plenty of others — that popular music wouldn’t sound remotely the same if Iggy and the Stooges hadn’t erupted out of the Ann Arbor/Detroit scenes at the dawn of the 1970s.
Reviled as moronic caterwauls of guitar noise and screaming, early albums like “The Stooges’’ (1969) and “Fun House’’ (1970) took rock ’n’ roll back from the hippies and reclaimed it as a primal assault on all things proper — i.e., what it was supposed to have been all along. From this band (and other outlying pioneers) came the mid-’70s punk revolution. As pointed out in “Gimme Danger,’’ the Ramones got together because they were the only four kids in their high school who liked the Stooges.
That was 40 years ago now, and all the Ramones are dead. Half the Stooges, too: Ron Asheton died in 2009 and his drummer brother Scott at least made it into this film before giving up the ghost in 2014. Against the steepest of odds, Iggy survives. Nearing 70, he looks healthier than ever, as if everything we know is wrong and wretched excess guarantees longevity.
Jarmusch, who remains one of the most independent-minded of the 1980s indie pioneers — his latest feature, “Paterson,’’ stars Adam Driver, opens later this year, and is by all accounts a honey — approaches his subject with almost too much reverence. Holding forth from a makeshift throne garnished with skulls, Iggy is hardly sedate. “Gimme Danger,’’ by contrast, is.
But it’s essential rock history from the men who made it, skipping over Iggy’s solo years (no “Lust for Life’’? really?) and concentrating on the lore and legacy of one of the bedrock rock groups. And if “Gimme Danger’’ never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.
“Music is life and life is not a business,’’ Iggy says here to a tuxedoed audience of music-industry heavy hitters in a video clip from the Stooges’ 2010 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And then he gives them the finger.
***
GIMME DANGER
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Starring Iggy Pop. At Kendall Square. 108 minutes. R (drug content, language, Xtreme showmanship)
Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
