Poly Styrene stormed her way into punk greatness with the opening lines of X-Ray Spex’s first single: “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard / But I think, ‘Oh bondage, up yours.’ ” Her band’s 1978 album Germfree Adolescents is a classic, avoiding the genre’s traps and clichés and standing out through Styrene’s voice and perspective — as well as the unusual punk-band choice of working with a saxophone. But Spex broke up before they could record a follow-up, and Styrene — born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said to a Somali father and white British mother — released only three solo albums before her death in 2011 from breast cancer.
Her daughter Celeste Bell, who directed Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché with Paul Sng, is well positioned to explore Styrene’s legacy. Though Styrene left the world with a small body of music, the film shows just how much she accomplished in a short period. What’s more, in only a few years, she went from a giggly teenager speaking enthusiastically to TV interviewers to a woman reeling from the pressures of fame, repeatedly being hospitalized due to mental illness.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché — showing Feb. 7 at the Belcourt as part of the theater’s Music City Mondays series — draws on a large archive of drawings, photos and home movies kept by the singer. Bell and Sng made the wise decision to keep their newly shot interviews off screen — while the film incorporates the voices of many musicians as well as DJ/filmmaker Don Letts and journalists John Robb and Vivien Goldman, their faces are never shown. Actor Ruth Negga reads from Styrene’s diary, and the filmmakers shot new footage of the sea, the presence of which was very important to Styrene. But the balance of words and images is very carefully laid out.
This film shows a perspective that only Styrene’s daughter could have. Bell was born when her mother was 24, so she wasn’t alive during the X-Ray Spex days, but I Am a Cliché nevertheless reflects the fast pace of the punk years. The band had an extended engagement at CBGB in New York, which proved a turning point in Styrene’s life. As big as London is, in the ’70s it felt calm and collected compared to America’s embrace of consumerism and media overload, and Styrene saw the themes she sang about coming to life in the U.S. Her last few songs for X-Ray Spex go in a stranger direction, picturing sci-fi dystopias and including a hint of psychedelia.
She also developed mental health problems following a bad drug experience in New York. Initially diagnosed as a schizophrenic after hallucinating a UFO that came to her window, Styrene was frequently hospitalized and sedated. Many films about female artists with difficult lives turn into misery porn, but Bell and Sng are careful to highlight the positive elements of their subject’s life. A religious awakening and travel to India turned into an embrace of life in a Hare Krishna ashram, and Styrene finally reconciled with fellow Hare Krishna convert Lora Logic, who was the band’s saxophonist before Styrene threw her out. Angered in her youth by her mother’s neglectful treatment, Bell also reconciled with Styrene before her death and worked with her on her final album Generation Indigo.
Styrene’s voice set a pattern for female punk singers to come — play Bikini Kill next to X-Ray Spex and it’s easy to spot the influence. She was an innovator, and the first woman of color to front a British rock band signed to a major label. But Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché shows how she chafed at the sexism of the music industry and other rockers, even as she avoided aligning herself with feminism or any other political movement. Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché achieves an emotional dimension that a director who never knew Styrene would struggle to hit, and transcends her status as a punk icon to show a vulnerable, flawed woman who achieved so much.
