Watching the very entertaining portrait of the frontman of the band could actually make you completely change your mind,… it’s simply a love fest for the man, as the huge gallery of rock stars who appears in the movie (I think I will have a hard time to remember all of them, but I’ll try with Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Navarro, Kat Von D, Nikki Sixx, Henry Rollins, Billy Bob Thornton, Joan Jett, Dave Grohl, Slash, Alice Cooper, Steve Vai, Dave from The Damned, Slim Jim Phantom, Jason Everman, Mick Jones, Robert Trujilloand every member of Metallica, Peter Hook, Marky Ramone, …) all praise Lemmy for his generosity, authenticity and humanity, … no one has a bad word to say about him!
The documentary is a portrait of the guy, moving around his complex personality, his unique fashion sense which gives him the appearance of an army cowboy turned punk biker, his indestructibility and toughness, he directly expresses when he speaks with this strange almost-burnt-out voice, but if you thought Ozzy was difficult to understand, you may think twice,… man, I needed the subtitles all the time!…
But tough is a weak word to describe the guy who would survive the cockroaches after a nuclear war as someone is saying at one point. With a lifestyle that would have killed an elephant a long time ago, a heavy diet of cigarettes, whiskey and drugs, Lemmy, at 63, is the incarnation of toughness. There are numerous scenes filming him just walking towards the camera, emanating the most macho-esque and intimidating presence you can imagine, but, nevertheless he appears like a good-nature and loveable person,… how is this possible? I mean, usually I hate this kind of persona, but, may be, you will have to go back to what Henry Rollins was saying, he is the real deal, not an ounce of fake in him, and this probably is why it works.
Motorhead was founded in 1975 and has been a very successful band since with incessant recording and touring, but surprisingly Lemmy lives in a modest apartment in LA, does not seem to own a car (each time, he is filmed in a limo), and even cooks himself? Fuck Keith Richards, and all these fat cats who survived the 60’s, wander around in super jets and fuck supermodels and the most expensive hotels in Paris, says Dave Grohl at one point… that’s true, there is nothing of this in Lemmy’s lifestyle. He goes to Amoeba to buy a Beatles box set, he watches ‘Family guy’ in his tour bus, he has an obsession for Las Vegas, he hangs out with his friends at the Rainbow bar and grill on the Sunset strip (‘a place to die’) and if you give him a bottle of his favorite Jack Daniel’s and a pack of cigarettes, he can stay there forever. He is a simple man with simple tastes… or is he?
Well, he has stuff, a lot of stuff, collectable junk accumulated over the years, because this is what we do in life, as Lemmy said, we get stuff, and some of it we like and keep. I would say it is borderline compulsive hoarding in his case, with an infinite built-up of indescribable-pop-culture-Motorhead-related objects, but his best collections are the weapon ones, the World War II memorabilia, and this is when things become uneasy. Jason Everman (Nirvana, Soundgarden) even says that Motorhead is ‘good war music’.
All this Nazi memorabilia, all these weapon collections, could surely reload the absurd guns of all the Rush Limbaugh of the world. Even though Lemmy is asked about his controversial hobby and admiration, the answer, summarized as ‘It’s still a free country’, did not satisfied me totally. But may be that’s all there is to say, Lemmy doesn’t need to justify or to excuse himself for what he does, he just does it.
Concert footages are left for the second part of the movie, with plenty of scenes showing him around the world, from Finland to Moscow, worshipped like a goth god anywhere, and triumphing on stage with Metallica. You have to wonder whether it is the same man who, a little earlier in the movie, declared in front of the camera and his son Paul Inder, that he is the best thing that happened to him, or the guy who got paralyzed by pain for three days when the girl he loved overdosed on heroin?
Lemmy embodies a famous lifestyle that does not really exist anymore, and, as expected, he does not regret anything,… life is too short for this and he is too old to find God now.