beautiful rebel (now on Netflix) biopictures (is that a word? It is now) the life of Gianna Nannini, whom AllMusic describes as “Italy’s most important rock singer” and a staple of mid-century European MTV . 80s. That basic context is confusing, if not entirely absent, in the film, which seems to limit its appeal to those who know her work, so good luck to the rest of us, I guess. So I’ll do some of that for my fellow unknowns: Nannini’s career spans more than 40 years and nearly 30 albums; She is known as a provocateur with a fierce independent streak (one of her early album covers featured the Statue of Liberty holding a vibrator instead of her usual torch); musically, she’s somewhere between Melissa Etheridge and Joan Jett; And if I’m not mistaken, she is something of a queer icon. Now, does Nannini deserve a biopic that gives him more than usual? behind the music Ups, downs and returns to form? Of course. Do you understand it? In the least.
BEAUTIFUL REBEL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Gianna (Letizia Toni) looks directly into the camera. —What are you afraid of? —asks the voice of an off-screen interviewer. “Madness,” is her response. We then cut to the late 1950s: young Gianna sings on the radio and then we jump forward a few years to a scene where her father Danilo (Maurizio Lombardi) insists that she stop singing to play tennis and then we jump to a scene. in which her father scolds her for coming home late after doing God knows what with that guitar and that miniskirt and she blackmails him into letting her continue with music, because he knows he’s been cheating on her. mother. A few more years pass in the space of a single issue and Gianna leaves the house and moves into a seedy hotel, where she plasters a Janis Joplin poster on the wall and befriends the local sex workers, one of whom connects her with a friend who gets her foot in the door of a record label and then the sex worker friend dies of an overdose. Do we get her name? Maybe not? Things move pretty fast here.
Gianna gets a job singing and playing piano in a salon, but it’s too uptight for people like this tough woman who rides a motorcycle. A review of her song “Death by Self-Inflicted Abortion” gets her canned, but that same song makes a record executive cry and Gianna gets a deal. She meets a gentleman named Marc (Stefano Rossi Giordani), who becomes her lover; She meets a woman named Carla (Selene Caramazza), who also becomes her lover. Then, BAM, we get a moment where Carla says, “You’ve made two albums,” which tells us that some time has passed. Gianna visits her family and she really bothers her dad with the cover of her third album (he’s not really into vibrators), so she struts out of the house. The album, “America,” becomes her breakthrough, and we realize this fact when her mother and her brother watch her perform on television, suggestively licking the microphone stand and fellating the man. microphone. Her father turns off the television. Gianna, march to the rhythm of her own rhythm.
With success comes… well, guess. If you said “drugs,” pat yourself on the back. He tries LSD and ends up snorting loads of cocaine, much to the chagrin of Carla, who takes it again and again, but at this point he starts using enough again to get her to stop doing drugs, so he quits. That episode, maybe seven minutes or so, takes us into Gianna’s Period of Musical Reinvention, which occurs during her (she checks notes) I don’t know what year. But her hideous curly, spiky mullet tells us it must be the 1980s by now. We get a few fake scenes of her trying to write a song, and you know how they go: one moment she’s playing the piano in frustration, the next, the words and harmonies pour out of her like Gatorade poured out of a bucket on top of the winning coach. And right now is when we finally get an idea of what was going on in the opening interview scene; back then, they called it a “nervous breakdown.” Up until this point, the sequences were frustratingly short, but this Next One is about three weeks long. Coherence is not this film’s strong point.
What movies will it remind you of?: if you thought Bob Marley: One love It was a generic biopic, well, beautiful rebel the generics beat it by a mile. So here’s a recommendation for a movie about music is my life that isn’t based on a true story, but is still excellent: wild Rosethat will subject you to the brilliance of a breakthrough performance from Jessie Buckley.
Performance worth seeing: Toni seems perfectly capable of doing Nannini justice, but this script is not at all up to par.
Memorable dialogue: When Carla has a headache and Gianna breastfeeds her, Gianna says, “I have a black belt in headaches,” which is the first time we hear that Gianna has chronic headaches. Is that an important part of the character? It seems that. Why haven’t we heard anything about it until now? I can’t answer that.
Sex and skin: Some semi-graphic sensuality of butts and tits.
Our opinion: beautiful rebel It has the cornerstones of a very good story: talented protagonist, charismatic subject, dramatic life in rock ‘n’ roll, lots and lots of very interesting hair. But the film tries to cover too much ground, jumping gracelessly from scene to scene and rarely providing the context needed to properly orient us to the setting. On the one hand, it’s nice to see a biopic that doesn’t feed us montages of concert tours and chart-topping songs. On the other hand, it would be nice to know when and where we are, what year it is, and what level of success Gianna has achieved up to this point.
As expected, the film culminates with his grand triumphant return to live performance, and that’s when we quietly say to ourselves: Oh, I guess Gianna can fill arenas now.. If you are not a fan, then this movie is not for you. On the other hand, if you’re a fan, you’ll be frustrated by its merciless editing, which doesn’t even allow the triumphant return to live performance to last a single song. You already know that one of the worst biographical films of recent times, Bohemian Rhapsodymanaged to enthusiastically stage Queen’s impressive Live Aid concert, or how Elvis Did it come to life when the King came on stage and incited teenagers to scream until they took off their panties? beautiful rebel believes those scenes should be cut in half.
Character development gets the same treatment: just as we’re about to settle in and get to know Gianna in a less superficial way, the film fidgets and skips to the next biographical point. However, this is not her biggest failure. No, that would be a big reveal in the third act, which makes a circus clown stepping into a barrel look like a ballerina performing the perfect plié. Total clumsiness. The main love story between Gianna and Carla is barely taking root; the subplot about daddy problems is full of clichés; the description of mental illness offers little insight into how it helped define Gianna’s character; The period details are reasonably convincing in every way except the wigs, and you can barely smell the mixture of eyebrow sweat and scalp glue. The film concludes with real-life footage of Nannini at a political performance and protest, and in just those brief moments, it’s evident that she is a much, much more compelling figure than the film we just saw.
Our call: Rebel against bad biographical films. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
