As members of the Culture Club concede towards the end of “Boy George and the Culture Club,” the ‘80s pop phenomenon never really parted ways when they continued to tour after the four albums they recorded from 1982 through 1986, leaving director Alison Ellwood potentially without much of a conclusion to tell the story of a band that burned fast and bright and like so many others settled into a steady routine of working musicians who returned to play the hits after their moment in the sun was over. (Even drummer Jon Moss, who left the band in 2018, describes the situation as a bit of a “boomerang” where it always comes back, cryptically not ruling out his own return.) That why it proves wise on Ellwood’s part to draw a more interesting conclusion from the band’s beginnings, seeing the Culture Club as a nearly fatally flawed enterprise from the start that has likely endured due to the same strange mix of ingredients that so often put them in peril.
For a band most well-known for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”, it remains an open question throughout whether anyone in Culture Club still actually likes each other when all members are filmed separately, seated on couches where there’s always a little more room for one more. Ellwood, who previously directed “The Go-Gos” and co-directed “The History of the Eagles” with Alex Gibney, has long understood fraught group dynamics, and despite the fact that the making of “Boy George and the Culture Club” was likely motivated by rejuvenating the band’s back catalog when the music publisher Primary Wave is a producer, there is a story worth telling from London where Mikey Craig and George O’Dowd, better known as Boy George, first met and surreptitiously decided to start a band together in the wake of the latter being dropped from Bow Wow Wow. As Craig relates, George and Moss, who soon joined as a drummer, became romantically intertwined before the band could even release their first album and besides the taboo of a gay relationship at the time that could threaten their popularity, the deck was always stacked in the group of four where George and Moss could be expected on one side of an argument and Craig and guitarist Roy Hay were on the other.
However, if there is much ill will, it never seems too severe and is rarely shown, but the divide that occurred organically and relayed by the film just as naturally in having the story of the band told from each individual’s perspective revolved around the emergence of Boy George as a central star with his eye-catching hats and makeup, leaving Craig, Moss and Hay behind in his orbit. Rather than suggest an imbalance of power, the film finds other more interesting implications when Boy George would begin receiving invites that other members did not and while the others could go out in the foreign countries they’d tour, Boy George couldn’t leave his room when he’d be mobbed outside. George’s lament in the film’s opening minutes, “When you encounter fame, it’s such a distraction” starts to resound throughout when the notoriety he drew with his appearance and charisma were a key part of getting audiences to listen to the band’s music, but fractured the band to the point where artistically getting back in sync was unlikely, putting exhaustion ahead of Boy George’s eventual drug problems as the end of the band’s most prolific period.
There’s no need to explain the challenge they faced with having Boy George as the central focus when Ellwood is confronted similarly in organizing a story about the band’s history, seemingly having no other choice than to put the lead singer upfront at least for the start of the film. But notably, his introduction is immediately followed by a boisterous performance by the Culture Club, an ordinarily perfunctory transition that takes on a greater weight in the case of this particular biography as it reminds of a genuinely unique creative confluence that the film does well to contextualize, showing how in the wake of punk movement Craig, the son of Jamaican immigrants who had reggae in his bones, paired well with Boy George, who was rebellious by nature, to create something with edgy on their own terms that stumbled into broad appeal. As with the music itself, “Boy George and the Culture Club” lines up some inherently incongruous elements to connect.
“Boy George & Culture Club” will screen again at the Tribeca Festival at the AMC 19th St East 6 on June 12th at 2:30 pm.