SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock

Rock’s wildest years – both the man and the music – swirl together into a psychedelic maelstrom of pills, pictures and brilliantly creative swearing.

The tale is told entirely through Rock’s perspective, with no friends, colleagues, or talking heads weighing in. But that turns out to be no detriment, since the Cambridge-educated photographer proves a witty and rueful commentator whose observations are infused with self-deprecating humor.

Rock’s lack of self-importance prevents the doc from fetishizing the past, and Clay — who appears to have met the photographer on the set of a TV on the Radio video — is wise to assume that the world doesn’t need yet another reminder that it used to be full of gods.

Throughout, the content and tenor of certain stories told by Mick Rock ambitiously inform the film’s style.

Narrated entirely by its subject – no famous faces popping up to tell us what a ledge he is – the film is intimate and crisply told.

The talking heads (lower case) are fine, but the dream-drama music-video theater piece of Rock on a gurney while nurses and doctors consult around him takes too much time away from the reason people want to see this: what Rock saw.

The movie’s approach is gratuitously grandiose.