I'm not generally a huge fan of the rock-doc genre...in fact, I'm generally don't like documentaries in general. However, I was pretty intrigued when I saw this come in the mail, considering I actually have listened to a bunch of 13th Floor Elevators songs, since I do like 60s psychadelia. However, I didn't realize how strange a story there is behind this band and its frontman. The story is tragic and interesting, but the style that the film-makers utilize is very stale and borderline boring. While you continue to be hooked to the film just to see how insane Roky Erickson really was, there is nothing that great brought to the table. The film seems to leave out large gaps of his life, and since the topic is sort of obscure, there appears to be a shortage of archival footage on the man, since you see the same tapes in bits and pieces throughout the movie. Also, as is the case with a lot of other similarly-themed documentaries, the film seems extremely exploitative and sometimes (possibly unintentionally) pokes fun at the subjects that it's chronicling.
All in all, the film is a by the book documentary. There's a promising singer with a messed-up family, whose drug abuse mixed with his childhood traumas cause him to aquire schizophrenia and go insane. I feel like I've heard similar stories about a million times, and as I previously mentioned, the film-makers don't really bring on much new material to the genre. The courtroom scenes are very dormant, since it really didn't seem to be a very high-profile case, and everybody in the courtroom (even sometimes the family) seems to be bored and distant. Therefore, this was a very bad way to begin the film, and it doesn't really hook you at all. But when the movie gets going and begins to dictate Roky's early life with the 13th Floor Elevators, the movie finally hooks you. This was by far the most interesting part of the film.
What the movie claims (and if true, what I did not realize) is that the 13th Floor Elevators in fact started a movement in San Francisco psychadelic music in making their sound more electric and R&B based than the folk based tunes of bands such as Grateful Dead. This aspect of the film was very alluring to me, and it was to my sister as well, who I watched it with. But the film did not seem to capitalize on this. They treated that era of Roky's life as sort of a sidenote, and focused more on his insanity and his family issues. While his insanity was a gripping and tragic thing to watch, his family issues just got annoying.
That is where the film seemed exploitative. It made no distinct effort to try and make you lfeel for any of the members of Roky's family (except maybe his mom, who was in my mind the worst of them all). The film-makers basically wanted you to think that his entire family was messed up, and that, along with his extraordinary amount of drug use, caused his eventual schizophrenia. I feel like his brother in Pittsburgh (his name escapes me for the moment...) was the most heart-felt of the bunch, but I also felt like he used his brother to an extent. He was the one that seemed the most set on getting Roky back into performing, which is a very good idea, but I got the feeling that he just wasn't ready for that. All his brothers were just weird, and so was his dad. (I was really disturbed by the reference to one of the brothers being "with his father in bed.")
The film also attempts to manipulate your sympathies too much. It focused a lot on Roky's mother, and her great love for him, but his insanity was partially her fault. In the accounts heard from the brothers and Roky's own son, Evelyn Erickson shut him away from the world. She tried to "protect him", but in doing so she only increased his distance from the world by isolating him to his house. And her firm belief in not using drugs was just stupid, especially after you see Roky in Pittsburgh after taking them and how much more down to earth he is.
Despite all of the films flaws, there were several very interesting aspects, most prominently Roky's stint in psychadelia with the 13th Floor Elevators. The accounts of his extreme drug use (300 acid trips???) are really strange, and it's very cool to hear accounts of people who lived through that era and witnessed the entire drug culture that Roky was so engraved in. I also found it awesome how Roky once considered himself an alien, who was zapped by human beings into this human creature. It was disturbing, yet hilarious at the same time. And the mentions of his time in the asylum was cool, except there really wasn't many. It was these parts when the film was at its best.
Overall, though, it was a pretty mediocre documentary. It's respectable, and the topic is great, but there just wasn't quite enough information on the parts that really should have been emphasized. But something that I just found out: Roky Erickson is back performing, and does concerts back in Austin. That's pretty uplifting, considering he's a schizoid coming out of a mental asylum.