Watch the Tunes: Lemmy

There is an absurdly vast selection of music movies and documentaries available on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, and on and on and on. But it’s hard to tell which ones are actually worth your 100 minutes. Watch the Tunes will help you pick what music doc is worth your Netflix and Chill time every weekend. This week’s edition covers Lemmy, which is streaming over on Netflix.

There’s a moment in the 1994 comedy Airheads where Brendan Fraser, having taken a Los Angeles rock radio station hostage along with his bandmates, invokes the name of Lemmy Kilmister as a means of sussing out a supposed record executive’s credibility. Fraser and his crew, the Lone Rangers, will agree to let the radio station’s staff go free in exchange for a record deal and Fraser’s worried that the cops sent him a fraud, so he poses the question “Who'd win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or God?” The answer, of course, is that Lemmy is God, and the clever ruse exposes the exec as the empty suit that he is. It’s a perfect bit of dialogue because, as our movie of the week reveals, while Lemmy is perhaps closer aligned with The Devil, he’s certainly a pillar in the rock and roll pantheon of celestial beings who are worth every ounce of praise you can muster. Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski’s film Lemmy (subtitled "49% motherfucker. 51% son of a bitch") takes a dude that fair-weather fans might know as something of a hard rock caricature, and presents a supremely complicated individual who was ultimately much more than simply the sum of his parts.

Not only did Lemmy help define the speed and tone of the punk rock that would follow, but the guy pretty much out punked the punks at being aggressively himself to the point of outright obliviousness of the norms he was challenging. It’s downright wonderful all the ways that Lemmy flips pretty much every conceivable expectation you have of him on its ear. For all the thunderously heavy riffs he cranked out over his lifetime, Lemmy loved Little Richard and the sugar sweet harmonies of 50s girl groups. He’s got a thing for Nazi uniforms and tanks and swords, but felt equally comfortable in the shortest shorts imaginable. That we can see so many multitudes contained in one person, all them happily coexisting in perfect leather-jacket Fonzie coolness, is the real power of the film, in my opinion.

If there’s one criticism I could levy against Lemmy it’s that it should have been more “Ace Of Spades” than spacey Hawkwind suite. The last third of the film, including way too much time spent on stage at a Metallica show, simply sags in comparison to the cranked up material that got you there. That said, some of the tangents that the film explores are fascinating, like the unexpectedly moving dive into his relationship with his son. In all seriousness, this could have been just footage of Lemmy shooting the shit with his kid, and I would have been just as happy.

Very early on in the film, which was released in 2010, you hear someone comment that "If they drop a nuclear bomb, Lemmy and cockroaches are all that are going to survive." Looking back on the whole of 2016 with the number of legendary rock stars who were taken from us too soon (two months left, knock on wood), we can point to Lemmy’s death in late December last year as the canary in the coalmine of what was to come. He might have been the one that, on paper, was the most obvious to pass away, but it still came as a shock since it really felt like the only guy who might out live him would be Keith Richards. Let’s be honest: Prince and Bowie were aliens, but Lemmy was a something else, a god or devil, who graced us with his presence here on earth. Thankfully he had the chance to be a part of this film that now fits the bill nicely as an obit for how uniquely awesome he was.