Gimme Danger review: Jim Jarmusch's Iggy Pop and the Stooges doco one for the fans

★★½
(M) 108 minutes

They say if you can remember the 1960s (or is it the '70s?) you weren't really there. Iggy Pop, in Jim Jarmusch's new documentary Gimme Danger, proves there are exceptions to this rule: despite his reputation for Dionysian excess, he never seems to have trouble recalling what he was up to in any given month, or who his collaborators were.

This is not a film about Iggy alone: the focus is on his band the Stooges, active between 1967 and 1974, and Jarmusch is more interested in paying tribute to them as precursors of punk than in tracking the subsequent solo career of their frontman (who's referred to in the credits by his birth name, James Osterberg).

Still, there's no question about who's the star here. Recounting his early days, Iggy, or Osterberg, spends much of the film seated on an antique chair resembling a gold throne, with a skull nearby. Dead-eyed and self-absorbed, he isn't the greatest raconteur, though he's certainly committed to his myth: in between ensuring that details of time and place are accurately on record, he recounts various anecdotes that usually end with him chortling at his own bad behaviour.

The mix of self-seriousness and anti-establishment posturing leads to a handful of Spinal Tap moments – notably Iggy's insistence that the Stooges' 21st-century reunion should instead be known as a "reunification".

By and large Jarmusch views his subject with reverence, perhaps to a fault. To his credit, he avoids dwelling on his subject's well-documented issues with mental illness and addiction. But despite his reputation as a pioneering independent director, Jarmusch also makes no attempt to reinvent music documentary formula.

He does his best to cover all the bases: there's testimony from others who were around at the time – among them Stooges drummer Scott Asheton, who died in 2014 (the film was shot over a number of years). Archival footage is used where available; gaps in the record are covered with snippets of mock-primitive animation, a device that's quickly becoming a documentary cliche.

More unusual but equally cutesy is the free-associative use of film clips, including glimpses of Hollywood's original Three Stooges (one of whom, Moe Howard, apparently gave the band his blessing).

On balance, this is mostly for fans – and even they may feel some of the mixed emotions that arise whenever a one-time rebel is ushered into the hall of fame.