Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
Tuesday, February 7
8 p.m.
$5
18+
In the months before his untimely 2010 death, interviews with Memphis garage rock icon Jay Reatard started to get dark. "I'm in fucking panic mode," he told the A.V. Club in 2009, and there was little doubt he was serious. 12 months later, he was dead of a cocaine overdose.
Documentary filmmakers Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz spent a week with Reatard nine months before his death, and Better Than Something is the movie that was made as a result. In blending candid footage from their week together with interviews and archival concert footage, Hammond and Markiewicz created a sympathetic portrait of a deeply flawed rock star, a man whose ear for melody and allegiance to lo-fi aesthetics will forever be marred by his taste for drugs and adoption of a derogatory term for the mentally handicapped as his stage name.
Landlocked Music will bring Better Than Something to the Bishop on Tuesday, effectively giving the film its Indiana premiere. The documentary has garnered mostly positive reviews from its numerous appearances at film festivals, but it has only been screened commercially a few times. It's a rare opportunity that Bloomington music enthusiasts would be remiss to waste.
Post by Brad Sanders
