Critic Reviews

Jarmusch’s movie serves both as a fine intro to one of rock’s great bands and as a window for longtime fans into what makes Iggy tick.

Jarmusch allows Pop and the music of the Stooges to be the focus of the film. For most fans, that will be enough: Pop proves to be as likable and riveting on screen as he is on stage.

If not every detail of the band's fluctuating fortunes and lineup is chronicled with crystal clarity, the punchy scrappiness of Jarmusch's film — stuffed not only with electric concert footage but with a cornucopia of amusing visual references, plus cool graphics and some droll original animation by James Kerr — is an appropriate fit for the subject.

Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.

The Stooges were postwar kids who took to the stage with fearless, demented exuberance, Iggy writhing half-naked. With Gimme Danger, Jarmusch doesn’t ask him to strip down further. He simply thanks him.

By the end of this tight and timely documentary – once again, we’re a nation in chaos, breeding some ridiculously fine rock & roll while the world burns.

Even if you don’t agree with Jarmusch’s introductory claim that The Stooges are the greatest rock and roll band ever, there’s still a lot of pleasure to be gleaned from Gimme Danger; most of it coming from Iggy’s love of the band, the music, and inability to be anyone but his incomparable and uncompromising self.

Considering how cheerfully its subject courted controversy, this is a chummy, openly booster-ish profile, designed as an introduction for those ignorant of the Stooges’ legacy. It’s plenty entertaining, but it’s also nearly as tame as Iggy, in his prime, was wild.

In a sense, the weirdest thing about Gimme Danger is how not weird it is.

If Gimme Danger never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.