Coincidentally, I was reading in the paper today that Ringo Starr says he'll never write an autobiography because eight years of his life are all that interest the public, whereas he'd already lived enough for five volumes of autobiography even before he joined the Beatles. In the case of Jobriath, you'd expect even a shorter interesting period. If the public remembers him at all, it's as a failed novelty act, and his career was over almost before it began. But this documentary makes his earlier life, and his later life, just as interesting as his brief publicity splash if not more so. First of all, he wasn't just a nobody who met a Svengali; he was an unusually talented composer, and we hear flashes of originality, sadly enough, not in the music of his that was promoted but in other compositions that happen to have been picked up on home recordings. And surprisingly, although dispirited by his commercial failure, he managed afterward to open a chapter 2 of his life. The movie presents the whole arc in an elegantly structured way, and if it were a novel you might here and there complain that the story is just too good to be believable. I did catch myself wondering whether the movie was part fact and part hoax. But I guess it's just that truth is stranger than fiction.
Review of Jobriath A.D.
