Like most music-loving men of my generation I first heard the name Alex Chilton the day I bought Pleased To Meet Me, so I'm not really sure why it took so long for me to watch Nothing can Hurt Me, the doc on Big Star and in particular, Chilton and the McCartney to his own Lennon, Chris Bell.
The good news is, there's a documentary on Big Star. The bad news is that for a band who so beautifully and meticulously put together two of the most beautiful albums of all time, #1 Record and Radio City (sorry, I never really got into their third one), precious few minutes of the film are actually about the making of the music. Do we need so much time with Jim Dickinson's widow, or going through Chilton's lost years in which he kind of looks like an idiot? Then there's the fact of Chilton's magnetism and charisma, but then nobody really talks about where it came from or what it propelled.
Also like many people I assume, when I think of Big Star I think of Alex Chilton. I knew Chris Bell and have long loved the wonderful I Am the Cosmos single and it's B-side, and the film does do a nice job of connecting the dots from the sound of the single back to the Big Star albums and pointing out it was Bell's vision that shaped the music perhaps more than Chilton. Bell supposedly left the band after the first record in part because of jealousy over the attention Chilton got, but 1) maybe don't ask a guy who had some massive global hits as a teenager into your band, since 2) rock critics are lazy as shit just like anybody else and of course they're gonna focus on a person in the band they've already heard of.
As Filmvetter mentions, the film suffers a bit since Bell and Chilton are dead, so they couldn't be interviewed. Chilton has always been a willing enigma, and Bell comes across in the film as a guy haunted about something we don't really know what, depressed and maybe a victim of his own artiness whose death at 27 seems somewhat inevitable. By the end of the movie you're simultaneously bummed thinking of all the great music Chilton and Bell never got to make together, but grateful for what little bit they did.
You can watch the film on Netflix or Hulu, here's the trailer.
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