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  1. Culture
16 November 2012updated 14 Sep 2021 3:40pm

The power of gusto

A documentary about a heavy metal prodigy tugs at the heart.

By Ryan Gilbey

What an emotionally exhausting week this is for UK cinemagoers. Whichever way you slice it, whichever demographic you belong to, handkerchiefs will be called for. I don’t care whether you’re at a genteel arthouse cinema or a 29-screen megaplex, this is going to be tough. Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning Amour, which I review in this week’s magazine, surely has the greatest claim on the nation’s tear-ducts, focusing as it does on an elderly man caring for his wife, who has suffered a stroke. But let’s not discount the final instalment in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn Part 2, which is going to break the hearts of those same teenagers who have only just recovered from bidding farewell to their childhoods a few years back with Toy Story 3. How will they survive without Edward, Bella, Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mitch and Tich?

Also released this week is Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet. Don’t be scared off by the title. Before seeing it, I had no idea who Jason Becker was or whether he was living or deceased. Nor did I expect to be giving any time to a documentary about a young guitar virtuoso drawn to the poodle-permed, tight-jeaned heavy metal scene and prone to performing protracted, squealing solos that last for several months at a time. Becker was a true prodigy, largely self-taught and with an intrinsic grasp on technique and theory that left veterans dazed. At 16, he recorded with Marty Friedman, later of arena-friendly metal giants Megadeth, under the name Cacophony. When they broke up after their second album, he was recruited into David Lee Roth’s band.

Before he could relish fully this coveted appointment, he was diagnosed with the degenerative disease ALS. His musical career, and his life, hit the buffers. He went from walking with canes to using a wheelchair to being completely paralysed, able only to move his eyes. Even these obstacles didn’t halt him.

The picture is cleverly assembled from archive footage and modern interviews by the director, Jesse Vile: such an inappropriate name for so compassionate a filmmaker. Vile has put into his movie exactly the right measures of pain and hope. For its first 40 minutes or so, we get to savour Jason Becker’s dazzling early years—the talent show footage, the home videos with that distinctive 1980s optical fuzz that makes you think Matt Dillon and Tatum O’Neal are just out of shot, wearing crop-tops and chewing Juicy Fruit. A single shot of Becker as he is today, his still-cherubic face framed with the same cascades of hair that advertise his fidelity to metal, is inserted into this early section, perhaps so that the shock to come won’t feel like a calculated ambush. But the foundations for the rest of the film are laid successfully by the poignant archive material: by the time Becker is savaged by ALS, we have a strong sense of his talent and potential against which to place the devastating diagnosis.

The wonder of Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet is that it mirrors its subject in refusing to become bogged down in the maudlin. As well as being deftly edited, it draws a lot of its energy from the extraordinary optimism and gusto of Becker’s family and friends. (His parents had already devoted their lives to him even before his illness, and he seems to have an entire network of ex-girlfriends willing to tend to him.) I also liked the use of Becker’s father’s paintings as both palate-cleansers and narrative stopgaps. They contribute to a continuity of thought and emotion on screen. The movie flows much as Becker’s life has done, interrupted but not derailed by the catastrophe at its centre.

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“Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet” opens in the UK on 16 November.

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