FIB Film of the Week: Gimme Danger by Jim Jarmusch

Gimme Danger is cult director fave Jim Jarmusch’s documentary about the legendary punk rock band The Stooges. It comes in from the time not at the beginnings of the band but unexpectedly at the point where the band fell apart, not too long after the release of their third album, Raw Power, in 1973.  Jarmusch considers The Stooges “the greatest rock band ever,” as he willingly admits in an early title card—an opening that suggests a refreshingly honest approach to even a band he reveres. Jarmusch’s decision to remove some of the mystique and legend he refers to Iggy Pop not by his more famous nom de guerre, but by his real name, James Osterberg, thereby seeming to life some of the veil on the famously anarchic stage personality, bringing him back into a more human form.

They upset audiences all over the country during their first few bumbling tours, Pop said. Still, the trailer also features an old interview clip in which the rocker sums up his influence, in a statement he (and his admirers) have made over the years as a point of pride: “I think I helped wipe out the Sixties.”

Gimme Danger proves to be more or less a straightforward rock documentary tracing the rise, fall, and subsequent revival of The Stooges over the decades. Interviews predominate, with band members Iggy Pop; drummer Scott Asheton in archival interview footage (he died in 2014); his brother Ron Asheton—who was the Stooges’ guitarist on their first two albums, The Stooges and Fun House—also in archival footage (he died in 2009); and James Williamson, the guitarist on Raw Power, all contributing. Even Jarmusch, it turns out, draws on the recent documentary cliché of illustrating interview anecdotes through animation—in this case, using stop motion to depict scenes from Iggy’s childhood living in a trailer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

Whether they were indeed the “greatest rock band of all time”, is really a debatable point. But with the presence of the human incendiary Mr Iggy Pop, who may no longer be the fireball he once was onstage, but who recalls his own life with refreshing forthrightness and august reflection. 

Perhaps Jarmusch’s relative aesthetic plainness could be said to echo its subjects: Iggy, the Ashetons, Williamson and the rest all exude an air of former bad boys looking back on their halcyon days nostalgically but without sentimentality (Williamson, after all, became a highly successful electronics engineer after his stint with The Stooges). Even Iggy’s magnetism, however, isn’t enough to paper over some of the telling gaps in the film: relatively little mention of the tensions within the band during its late-’60s/early-’70s prime that explains, say, why Ron Asheton wasn’t present on Raw Power; a superficial grazing of Iggy’s prevalent drug use; and a near-complete passing over of Iggy’s career as a solo artist before the Stooges reunited in the 2000s. By jumping from their breakup to their reunion, Gimme Danger reveals itself to be Jim Jarmusch’s own Shine a Light. Just as Martin Scorsese’s 2008 Rolling Stones concert documentary could be said to be the director’s own celebration of the supposed eternality of Mick Jagger and co even in their advanced age, Jarmusch’s film is ultimately a heroic celebration of not just the longevity of the Stooges, but of an artist’s ability to remain forever young despite the inevitable ravages of time.

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Writer: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton, Mike Watt, Scott Asheton, Danny Fields, James Williamson

Release Date: Oct. 28, 2016