The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002)
Directed by Charles Atlas

The Legend of Leigh Bowery celebrates Bowery's life and art with a fabulous parade of original Bowery footage and interviews with those who knew and loved him. Boy George is on hand to share the love, and once you see Bowery's own mode of makeup and dress, ol' George seems almost like the blandest of GAP models by comparison. The interviews place Bowery's truly out-there antics in various contexts (personal, societal, artistic) to make the argument that the man was much more than just a provocateur – Boy George goes as far as predicting that decades from now, there will be Bowery-inspired street gangs like the ones from A Clockwork Orange. It's possible that this has already happened, in the case of the Insane Clown Posse.

Though I very much liked this movie, it's far too conventionally structured to command any sort of "masterpiece" status, and hence remains a marginal (though fascinating) work. The birth-life-death trajectory is just so "A&E Biography." Bowery's life certainly deserves a documentary, though it probably also deserves a more outlandish and radical one than this. Still, this is what we've got, and it's a good primer on the visual flair and cheeky in-your-face-ness of Leigh Bowery, the man who made an art of "getting ready to go out."

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Savage Pampas