What does it mean to be “punk” in the 21st century? Does the term still invoke political and social protest or is it just a meaningless marketing label? And can that revolutionary spirit be revived to address contemporary issues? These are the central questions running through Wake Up Punk, an intimate documentary focused on some of the movement’s key British originators, notably fashion queen Vivienne Westwood and her son Joe Corré. World premiered at Glasgow Film Festival in February, director Nigel Askew’s debut feature is uneven and muddled, but not without bite and insight. It should generate modest buzz when it arrives on UK screens in May, partly due to Westwood’s high profile, but also because the legacy of punk remains a particularly live issue in Britain, a turbulent chapter in pop culture history that is endlessly debated, celebrated and contested across the media and academia.
The main protagonist of Wake Up Punk is Corré, the middle-aged son of Westwood and former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. Co-founder of the luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur, Corré has inherited some of his late father’s flair for provocation himself, stirring up media scandal with spiky rhetoric and confrontational spectacle. In late 2016, as London gears up to mark the 40th anniversary of punk rock with state-sponsored events and scholarly exhibitions, Corré hosts his own breakaway sideshow, announcing plans to publicly burn his personal archive of rare punk-era memorabilia worth a reported £5 million ($6.4 million). His avowed intention is to protest against the “corporate takeover” of punk, turning yesterday’s subversive rebellion into a toothless, tourist-friendly nostalgia industry. Cash from chaos.
Corré’s bonfire of the vanities becomes an international media sensation, giving him a big platform to hold forth about the evils of rampant consumerism and apolitical apathy. His ultimate aim, he claims, is to reclaim punk as an angry, disruptive counterculture movement informed by the anarchic spirit of the 1968 Paris riots and Situationist mischief-makers like Guy Debord. Alongside Corré’s diatribes, Askew also includes cameos by other veteran players from London punk’s first wave, each trying to sum up the movement’s lasting impact in their own words. The most poignant inclusion here is iconic muse and model Jordan Mooney – aka Pamela Rooke – who died earlier this month.
Alongside these documentary segments, Wake Up Punk is punctuated by staged dramatic vignettes featuring a gang of Dickensian urchins plotting to overthrow their capitalist oppressors. Drawing on McLaren’s self-mythologising image as a kind of punk Fagin, with a nod to similar scenes in Julien Temple’s classic early Sex Pistols film The Great Rock’n’roll Swindle (1980), this clumsy subplot feels stilted and superfluous, adding little to Askew’s documentary besides laboured metaphors and stiff performances from a pre-teen cast.
Inevitably, Wake Up Punk never quite pins down the lasting legacy of punk on the cultural and political landscape, mainly because the movement’s impact remains huge, contradictory and diffuse. Straining to draw firm conclusions, Askew eventually settles for vaguely implying that the punk ethos lives on today in graffiti artists, climate change activists and other tenuously connected rebel figures. By the time Corré and Westwood host the memorabilia bonfire, their message has become an impassioned but fuzzy lecture about saving the planet from crooked bankers and corporate eco-vandals, with a side order of support for controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need,” Corré tells the assembled media. “The illusion of an alternative choice, conformity in another uniform.”
While Corré and Westwood clearly have sincere intentions, their declamatory sermons feel a little condescending and self-serving, especially coming from two wealthy fashion moguls who some would argue are more part of the problem than the solution. But at least the highly theatrical bonfire prank, staged on a barge on the Thames river, has pleasing echoes of McLaren’s scandalous public spectacles during his Sex Pistols heyday. Tellingly, Corré dismisses media questions about the true financial value of the items he burns, balking at angry suggestions that the money could have been more usefully donated to charity. But in fairness he does find a witty way of recycling the ashes into artworks, with all profits going to charitable causes.
Even if it fails to convince as political polemic, Wake Up Punk works as an engaging insider peek inside London punk’s first family and their ongoing, complex, bittersweet relationship with the movement they helped create. Caught in off-duty mode, Westwood comes across as unusually open and garrulous, unpicking her tortuous romance with McLaren and her fondly maternal feelings towards the Sex Pistols. Sid Vicious was “sweet and lovely”, she recalls, but Johnny Rotten has become a clownish caricature mostly famous for being “good at spitting”.
Corré’s own difficult relationship with McLaren is also an opaque but significant thread in this emotionally raw psychodrama. Soon after hosting a grand public funeral ceremony for the notorious punk impresario, who died from cancer in 2010, Corré learned his father had cut him out of his will. Some of Askew’s interviewees suggest this deep wound helps explain the bonfire stunt, a post-Freudian angle that a more rigorous, less partisan film-maker might have probed further. Wake Up Punk raises some timely questions about the link between pop culture and political engagement, but it ultimately feels more like a small personal statement than a grand manifesto, and seems destined to become a minor footnote to the punk nostalgia industry that it seeks to critique.
Director, producer, cinematography, editing: Nigel Askew
Cast: Vivienne Westwood, Joe Corré, Ben Westwood, Eddie Tudor-Pole, Jordan Mooney, Daniel Lismore, Nick Reynolds
Music: Adamski
Production company: Know Future Ltd (UK)
World sales: Bus Stop Entertainment
In English
84 minutes
