THE STONES & BRIAN JONES - Mark Reviews Movies

The Stones and Brian Jones, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2023

Brian Jones lived a short but eventful and decisive life in the world of music. The founder of the Rolling Stones—a band that's somehow still going after six decades—and an early casualty of drug and alcohol addiction among too many of his peers, Jones receives a half-hearted biography from documentarian Nick Broomfield in The Stones & Brian Jones. The filmmaker was born only several years after Jones, grew up listening to the band's music (which isn't unique for anyone of that generation), and clearly wants us to see the man behind the music that made Jones, at the time, famous and, since his death, fade into comparative obscurity.

Today, people know the Rolling Stones by way of front man Mick Jagger, a rock showman of iconic stature, and Keith Richards, a genre-defining guitarist. When the band first started, though, Jones was as famous as those two, if not more so, because he was the face, the spokesman, and the creative manger of the group. Eventually, fame went to his head, and escalated by a lot of personal demons and that all-too-often fatal problem of having the means to constantly feed an addiction, Jones was dead at the age of 27.

What are we supposed to take from this story that we don't already know from so many other examples of its kind? That's the question Broomfield teases early on in his documentary, suggesting the promise that there's some secret to uncovering what happened to Jones and why it happened. Broomfield is often a provocateur in his movies, looking for or imagining conspiracies of questionable—albeit sometimes compelling—foundations. When he begins Jones' story with a discussion of his conservative upbringing to parents who disapproved of their son's fascination with music and anti-authority attitude, one might believe the director has some great revelation to which to build.

As it turns out, though, Jones' early family life might have contributed to him becoming the man he would be over the course of about a decade of living on his own. After all, his parents more or less kicked him out of the house when he was 17, after his rebellious teen years got him into some trouble and apparently became too much for his father and mother. From that time onward, he wandered here and there, spent time with many different families, and fathered multiple children with an equal number of women—none of whom, it seems, he stuck around with to actually be a father and partner.

It's unclear if Broomfield is attempting to connect all of these dots in a straightforward way, such as Jones didn't feel part of his own family, spent the last decade of his life searching for one, and, by example, abandoned each potential candidate as soon as things became too difficult, as his parents, from his perspective, did with him. Maybe Broomfield has nailed it. We'll probably never really know, because part of Jones' wandering lifestyle, combined with his short life, meant that he never stuck around in one place with the same people long enough for anyone to really get to know him. Once again in Broomfield documentary, he has made a compelling case based on a questionable foundation.

It seems as if the filmmaker knows that, too, because the idea of some psychoanalysis of the subject is left behind almost as soon as it's raised here. The rest of this movie is essentially a traditional biography, mixing elements of Jones' professional accomplishments with his personal history. The story of the early years of the Rolling Stones is something we've seen countless times before in documentaries, fiction, and the real world. Jones was the progenitor, hoping to form a band that would bring American blues to a British audience (Some footage of television and concert appearances by the young band is worthy of some note, to be sure).

Then, the band shifted gears, without Jones' approval and in order to become more popular. It worked, obviously, but it left an already insecure Jones feeling even more so about himself, his career, and his relationships with his fellow bandmates. Broomfield gets a lot of this story from present-day and archival interviews with Jones' assorted friends and romantic partners, as well as the Rolling Stones' former bass player Bill Wyman, who was also there from the start.

The movie doesn't paint Jagger and Richards in a particularly positive way, as anecdotes of them mocking and pranking Jones become more common in those last years. If the filmmaker wants to make some insinuation about a connection between that behavior and Jones' death, he's at least wise enough—or lawsuit-timid enough—not to take that next step here.

As for Jones' personal life, it's sad, if we accept him as a lonely young man desperate for but unwilling to make any kind of meaningful connection with another person, and/or just the norm, if we see it as a young man who wasn't prepared for the perils of fame and felt compelled to indulge in them because he's young and didn't know any better. The Stones & Brian Jones, then, is filled with plenty of implications but not much by the way of a perspective or substance.

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