REVIEW - STONED: ON JULY 2nd, 1969, Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones drowned in the swimming pool at his country estate in East Sussex. His death was officially recorded as misadventure, but the suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident prompted subsequent theories to the contrary, one of which claimed he was murdered.
Stoned, the first feature directed by film producer Stephen Woolley, directly addresses that issue as it charts the short life of Jones, who was 27 when he died - by morbid coincidence, the same age as Robert Johnson (whose songs feature on the Stoned soundtrack), Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, when each of them died.
In marked contrast to the majority of biopics on dead rock stars, Stoned refuses to airbrush the less palatable aspects of the subject's history, unflinchingly depicting Jones as manipulative, sadistic (and masochistic), self-obsessed and essentially unsympathetic. The core of the film is the odd couple bond formed between Jones (Leo Gregory) and handyman Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), who come from similar working-class backgrounds but inhabit worlds far removed from each other.
The film inevitably prompts echoes of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's haunting and complex Performance, which, in its picture of a gangster drawn into the decadent lifestyle of a dissolute rock star (Mick Jagger), was in part inspired by the edgy relationship between Jones and Thorogood. Anita Pallenberg, who acted in Performance, is a significant character in Stoned, as Jones's mistreated lover who leaves him for Keith Richards.
Woolley adeptly employs a kaleidoscopic time-shifting structure to draw an intriguing, impressionistic picture of Jones, reflecting on the changes pop stardom brought to his life and his weakness in dealing with the consequences. The period detail is as precise as one should expect from a film-maker who visited the '60s as a producer on Scandal, Absolute Beginners and Backbeat, which dealt with "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe.
