One of the great, freaky rock music movies. Its violence slices into your nerves, its trippy mushroom hallucinations almost convince you that you’ve eaten some yourself, and its sex scenes make you feel like you’ve personally stroked Anita Pallenberg’s nude body. It starts off as a gangster film that follows lanky James Fox as the nastiest thug in the London underworld. He gets off on murder, pain, and the humiliation of his victims. He even likes to choke girls during sex. His bosses eventually decide that he’s too dangerous to keep around and it’s time to give him the Old Yeller treatment. To get away, Fox hides out in the home of reclusive rock musician Mick Jagger and sinks into his world of beaded curtains, casually naked women, and free-flowing drugs.
It’s Mick Jagger’s first acting role and he does well for himself. His character’s emotional range is narrow, but that’s the point. Much like how Jagger deliberately slurs his words when he sings, he slurs through his performance here. His limbs are so loose, it looks like his head’s about to fall off. He’s plain spaced-out and he pulls the rest of the movie up to Mars with him. In other words, he’s the perfect weirdo rock star of the late 60s. This was also the first film from frosty oddballs Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (Cammell wrote the script and co-directed with Roeg).
Like most cult movies, this was controversial as hell when it came out. Critics didn’t like it and neither did the studio. Warner Bros. wanted a star vehicle for Mick Jagger rather than a bleak “head” movie in which he’s about as likable as mold spores. Performance finished production in 1968, but Warner Bros. would wait two years, and several cuts of the film’s sex and violence, to release it. Over the next few decades, the movie gained a lot more respect and today has a comfortable place among the wave of daring, personal films that came out of the late 60s and early 70s.