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It may be evolving into a genre, but I’m not sure that the becoming school of music documentary holds all that much promise. “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” released two months ago (after playing at the Venice Film Festival four years ago and then being rescued by Sony Pictures Classics and streamlined into zippier shape), has certainly been a resounding success. Marketed as an IMAX spectacular, it has made $10 million, and it’s a captivating Zep documentary, with one major qualifier: A story-of-the-band portrait that culminates in the release of “Led Zeppelin II,” the movie can’t help but leave you with a feeling of “Damn! Are we really not going to get to Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth record — a.k.a. the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ album?” It’s obviously the band’s masterpiece, and the fact that the documentary stops short of including it feels like a perverse consequence of the becoming genre.
“Becoming Madonna,” which played two weeks ago at CPH:DOX, has the opposite problem. The film comes on like it’s going to be taking a deep dive into Madonna’s early years: the fabled period, starting in 1978, when she arrived in New York City as a 19-year-old paragon of not-even-blonde-yet ambition. She spent the next four years entwining herself in every dimension of “downtown” — less a place (though it was certainly that) than a mystique that meant punk and new wave, that meant the more boutique outlets of disco, that meant the cutting edge of the art scene, that meant the trash-chic hipster poverty made possible by New York’s late-’70s financial downhill slide, which allowed a host of creative types to find a bombed-out bunker in the East Village to live in for next to nothing.
This period of Madonna’s life, in which she aspired to fame and built a vagabond stairway to get there, is almost the definition of fabled. We’ve all heard bits and pieces of it, but it deserves to be colored in. So I was eager to hook into “Becoming Madonna,” a film that includes enough well-chosen archival footage to give you the flavor of Madonna in her pre-celebrity era.
But let me blurt the big spoiler. “Becoming Madonna” shows us sections of the time Madonna spent in New York before she got famous, and it invites us to revel in that era…for all of 20 minutes. The period footage is great, but it’s not long before Madonna is in the studio recording “Everybody,” which became her first single, released on Oct. 6, 1982. And the rest, as they say, is extremely well-documented pop history.
“Becoming Madonna,” in other words, does not live up to the basic concept that it’s about Madonna becoming Madonna. Yet the strange thing about the movie is that it convinces itself it is about that by treating the glory days of her career as if she were still “becoming” who she was. An IMDb blurb describes the film as being about “Madonna’s rise to fame from 1978 to 1992,” which has to be one of the most unintentionally funny descriptions of a documentary I’ve ever encountered. It’s like saying, “A film about the formative days of the motion-picture industry, from 1915 to 1987.”
And that’s too bad, since the first part of “Becoming Madonna” — the part that really is about how she created who she was — is fascinating, even if the figures and events are presented in such a patchy way. When Madonna arrived in New York, having never flown in a plane or taken a taxi before (she claims she had all of $35 in her pocket), she originally planned to be a dancer. She took ballet classes and performed with several companies but became disenchanted with what she saw as the snooty princess world of ballet. (This was not downtown.) So she turned her attention to music. She started out by playing drums in the band Breakfast Club (we hear a recording; she wasn’t bad), and she quickly fastened onto the dream of being a lead singer. We see an astonishing clip of her in short dark hair, trying to rock out and be cool at the same time, fronting a band that looks like it’s sort of trying to be Blondie.
Any fan of Madonna’s will drink up this tantalizing 16mm scrapbook stuff. The Madonna we see looks slightly unformed, with bushy eyebrows and a smile that hasn’t found its full insolence, yet we can see that she has the beginnings of a radiance so massive that you wonder if back then she would have struck you as a star, or just a club kid with delusions of grandeur.
Yet we’d also like an authoritative chronicle of everything that happened, since Madonna intersected with as many notable figures as Zelig. And Michael Ogden, the director of “Becoming Madonna,” churns through these years in a slipshod way. The film keeps tossing out stray bits of information, like the fact that Madonna just about moved into The Music Building, the graffiti-strewn beehive of a studio rehearsal fortress several blocks south of Times Square. Yet it leaves out so much! Like the fact that Madonna studied under Martha Graham, or that she worked as a hat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room, or that she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint, or that she had a relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. And though it’s part of Madonna’s legend that she pestered the DJs at Danceteria to play her demo tracks, it would have been nice if the movie filled in that chapter instead of just…mentioning it.
The current documentary trend is to present talking-head interviews without actually showing you the heads that are talking. “Becoming Madonna” goes further. It doesn’t often bother to even identify who’s talking, so what’s happening is much fuzzier than it needs to be. We have to piece together who “Camille” is (Camille Barbone, who ran Gotham Records and became Madonna’s first manager), though the story of how Madonna was introduced to Seymour Stein, the president of Sire Records, is priceless. He was in the hospital at the time, and Stein recalls, “When she walked in, I could tell right away that she couldn’t have cared if I was laying in a coffin, as long as I could sign a contract.”
From there, the film spends its final two-thirds giving us…the Madonna story. The famous one. The one that began in the fall of 1983, when she released her first iconic singles (“Holiday” and “Borderline”) and rocketed to stardom with a kind of delirious inevitability, cresting in the moment when she released the album “Like a Virgin,” in November 1984, and then, six months later, costarred in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” using that fluke indie hit to enhance her image as the new bad-girl royalty of aristocratic thrift-shop bohemia. At that point, I can testify, she had achieved full Madonna. She’d become Madonna.
Yet the weirdness of “Becoming Madonna” is that it still treats her as if she was coming into her own. Ogden does something valuable by honing in on Madonna’s close relationships with gay men, who helped shape her style and sensibility. It’s moving and revealing to hear so much about her friendship with Martin Burgoyne, an East Village bartender who became her roommate and best friend. They were soulmates, and when he contracted AIDS, it hit her in the solar plexus. She became one of the formative warrior-activists of the AIDS era, like Elizabeth Taylor (whose friendships with gay men also loomed large), and by the time of the Blonde Ambition tour, this symbiosis had exerted a profound influence on Madonna’s performance persona. Her dancers were all gay, and this enabled her, as a pop star, to present herself in a new kind of pas de deux with masculinity. The way one might put it is: She was obsessed with men but would not be ruled by them — if anything, she would be the dominant force.
This was revolutionary at the time, and what I think too many people — or, at least, critics and media commentators — never understood about Madonna is that for all the S&M trappings, she was a profoundly romantic singer who turned her power games with men into the very measure of romance. You hear that indelibly in “Justify My Love,” which turns sexual domination (and submission) into an expression of love, the gorgeous coldness of the music lending that message its soulful conviction.
Yet as welcome as it is to see “Becoming Madonna” focus on Madonna’s interface with gay culture, the film becomes way too fixated on replaying her shock-theater greatest hits. Her spontaneous writhing-on-the-stage performance of “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV Video Awards, in 1984, the deliriously blasphemous (yet reverent!) video she created with director Mary Lambert for “Like a Prayer,” the release of the coffee-table art-porn book “Sex” in 1992 — the film tries to pump up the cosmic transgression of all this, showing us the tabloid headlines calling her a “slut” and “trash,” as well as the mainstream media coverage that was always so shocked by it all. Yet even at the time, the scandal was baked into the publicity. And that’s what “Becoming Madonna” doesn’t quite get. It presents these controversies as the ring of fire Madonna had to pass through to become who she was. Actually, she became who she was the moment she decided to light the fire.
English (US) ·