NoisePop Film Fest: You're Gonna Miss Me
We got to the Roxie maybe 10 minutes before the screening of the Roky Erickson documentary You're Gonna Miss Me in the Noise Pop Film Festival was scheduled to start, and we bought the fourth-to-last ticket for the movie. The line was nuts! All the way down 16th Street and wrapping around the check-cashing store down Valencia. While waiting to get in, we yvesdropped that the man in front of us was also a music documentary filmmaker, and he had just interviewed the Smithereens about a documentary he's making about the song Louie Louie.
The crowd inside was raucous, befitting a man who's an icon not only to 60s psychedelic fans but also 70s horror-metal ones -- a woman stood up and started shouting something about making Schwarzenegger the vice president and someone lobbed a handful of popcorn at her, hard. The crowd settled down some when the Noise Pop film fest organizer told everyone to behave, and that Roky was in the audience. (Roky is playing a sold-out show tonight at the Great American, also for Noise Pop).
Roky Erickson with director Keven McAlester
The movie started off with two San Francisco shorts -- one about feminist comic artist Trina Robbins and her female action figure collection, and the guys who have that huge rubber band ball at 22nd and Guerrero. We liked them, those these particular shorts might not have been the best pick for the audience, though, who amused itself by shouting out vulgar things throughout the screening.
For some reason, when they set up the screening for You're Gonna Miss Me, the projector left up the image of the digital clock counting down the run time for the movie, which was pretty distracting to us (since we knew the movie was 91 minutes long). Nonetheless, we were fascinated by the story, which is about how Roky Erickson slipped into severe schizophrenia, and his family's subsequent fight over his medical care.
Roky himself doesn't talk much in the movie, but director Keven McAlester faithfully recorded the ramblings of Roky's mother over what must have been a period of years. She doesn't seem like the most mentally-stable woman herself, as she pastes family pictures on flattened cardboard boxes and hoards piles and piles of things in her Austin, Texas house. Mrs. Erickson was named Roky's guardian after his mental breakdown and adamantly refuses to seek medical treatment for him, preferring yoga instead.
Roky's youngest brother Sumner Erickson, estranged from his mother and a principal tubaist for the Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra, tries throughout the movie to stage an intervention on behalf of his brother. Sumner seems a little quirky himself, living in a weird modernist loft in the middle of a row of single-floor houses in Pittsburg, and enchanted with a somatic therapy guru (who sounds an awful lot like his estranged mother) -- but he thinks his mother's abandoned Roky.
We won't spoil the rest of the movie, but it's an interesting, sad story. We were a little disappointed, though, that there wasn't more of the famous Roky Erickson music -- what little there was sounded great -- and we kept thinking throughout the movie about Daniel Johnston. (In fact, we're almost certain there's a scene of this movie shot in the exact same place as the scene where they narrate the facts behind Daniel Johnston's Austin breakdown.) We thought we were getting a movie about Roky Erickson's career and music -- but instead, it's a tight, introspective movie about mental illness and family strife. Which might, in the end, be the same thing.