Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché

In a genre often saturated with sugar-coated stories and selective memories, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché proves to be anything but.

More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color.

As the story progresses, Bell’s decision to share the focus and to examine her relationship with her mother makes more sense, bringing an intimacy and tenderness to the rock documentary format.

[A] riveting and valuable documentary.

An affectionate labour of love, cathartic yet bitterly honest, Bell and Sng’s films paints the full, unfettered picture.

Bell, appearing on camera but speaking in voice-over like everybody else, makes the celebration fun and the tragedy bittersweet in this fine tribute to the mother she only got to know and appreciate “too late” to gain the full benefits of being raised by an icon.

This restless film is hardly content to present a portrait of an icon, instead insisting, with compassion and clear eyes, that icons are all too human too.