The Public Image Is Rotten

Record nerds be damned, The Public Image Is Rotten rises to the top of rock documentary filmmaking with a refreshing sense of candid storytelling only made possible by the genuine frankness of its subjects.

Even if you’ve scratched your head over Mr. Lydon’s TV ad work and other efforts to maintain a professional life in recent years, this affectionate and frank movie can elicit newfound admiration for a slightly mellowed iconoclast.

Through it all, the icon endures — wild-haired, bug-eyed, his manic keening and yelping evolving into something quite musical in midlife. The man? Surviving, keeping the faith and carrying on. And mellowing. Just not all that much.

Blisteringly caustic as ever, John Lydon nevertheless reveals himself as an occasionally sentimental sort in Tabbert Fiiller’s fitfully revelatory and charming documentary.

As fascinating and well-crafted as it is, The Public Image Is Rotten is ultimately a vanity project, authorized by Lydon and his manager and meant less as an unvarnished journalistic documentary but as a burnishing of, well, his public image.

The Public Image is Rotten’s soundtrack is, of course, great, and the candidness from former bandmates regarding their backstabbing and youthful mistakes is certainly refreshing, but it’s all wrapped in a package wearing dad jeans: too safe, too simple, too given to a happy ending.

Unfortunately, The Public Image is Rotten often feels like an illustrated airing of grievances that also happens to be an in-their-words history of Lydon's best band.