It's not news that biographers can be Judases. And with Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, documentarian George Hickenlooper is clearly guilty of laying bare the pathetic aspects of his subject's life and making a sweet, vulnerable guy into an object of pity.
This could not have been what they had in mind when friends of rock impresario Rodney Bingenheimer hired Hickenlooper to celebrate the life of the guy who all but invented L.A.'s Sunset Strip rock scene in the '60s and '70s.
But Hickenlooper's most famous film, Hearts Of Darkness -- which chronicled Francis Ford Coppola's descent into madness making Apocalypse Now -- couldn't have been what Coppola had in mind either. In this kind of movie, the chips fall as they will. What Hickenlooper believes he's found in Rodney, a longtime DJ now in his dotage on L.A.'s mighty KROQ-FM, is a metaphor for the emptiness of celebrity worship. And it's hard to argue with this supposition when you look at Rodney's threadbare hot-plate existence, the lack of real love in his life, and the collection of autographed photos that are all he has to show for a life of insinuating himself on celebrity "friends."
The latter he has in abundance. Brian Wilson appears, David Bowie does a phone-in. Cher, Mick Jagger, Gwen Stefani, Brooke Shields and Courtney Love are among many who sing praises, or whose orbits otherwise intersect with "Rodney On The ROQ."
How did this sweet, mumbling gnome become close to so many rich and famous people? And why is he not famous himself?
The backstory is the most fascinating part of all. Rodney's mother was a seemingly deranged autograph hunter who left him at 14 on '60s starlet Connie Stevens' doorstep, telling him not to come home without her signature. Connie was out of town, as the story has it, so he wandered off to Sunset Boulevard where he joined the street kids and became a kind of mascot to the rock 'n' rollers.
From there the story becomes eerily like Woody Allen's Zelig, with Rodney popping up as Davy Jones' stand-in on The Monkees, showing up on album covers and liner notes, in pictures with presidents and standing alongside the icons of every stream of rock that followed -- including glam, punk, New Wave, goth and grunge -- maintaining a kind of vacant innocence throughout.
It follows that he maintained this innocence while exposed to any number of horrible people. As if to drive this point home, Hickenlooper gives ample screentime to one frankly fairly scary individual -- Kim Cowley, the record industry svengali who created the "jailbait" rock band The Runaways (whence sprang Joan Jett). Putatively a friend of Rodney's, Cowley's cold pronouncements are a counterpoint to Rodney's purity of motive.
At times Hickenlooper seems to hit cruelly hard at Rodney's pathos. Rodney professes to love a woman who's clearly using him. The filmmaker asks her about her true feelings while the two are together.
You can almost hear his heart breaking when she says she has a boyfriend and Rodney's "just a friend."
Instead, he maintains his cipherlike expression -- an empty gaze that doubles as a canvas for director Hickenlooper.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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