One of the highlights of "The Future is Unwritten" is November 2002 footage at its end, where Joe shows his support for Britain's firefighters' strike for a decent wage and against cuts. At this gig he says:"People can change anything, so let's do things from a level of confidence and go for it!"
Joe died one month later while still making an album, but these words sum up the film's underlying message.

Director Julien Temple uses old footage, home movies, animations of Joe's drawings and campfire interviews with Joe's friends and fellow musicians to illustrate his life.Some are revealing: a childhood friend tells of Strummer's boarding-school days and his brother's suicide.

Members of Strummer's old band the 101ers tell how Joe cut himself off completely once he went punk and decided to renounce his "hippie" days. Topper Headon relates his own drama of joining and being asked to leave The Clash, and of how hard it was to get past Strummer's persona.

It is the honesty of the friendship between the director, Julien Temple, and Joe Strummer which allows for a film that is not a one-sided tribute. It pays real homage to the energetic music Joe created and inspired which expanded the punk musical palette with reggae, hip-hop and rock and roll.

Joe, (born John Graham Mellor in 1952) was influenced by the 1970s, where economic prosperity and the victories of 1968 were melting away into rising unemployment, shrinking social service programs, and increasing poverty.

Punk grew in the late 1970s and early 1980s out of this desperate climate. Racism, xenophobia, and police brutality became the order of the day. Mounting problems and a deepening sense of isolation left many young people feeling angry and frustrated. Punk rock made sense and Joe used this medium to rage against all forms of oppression.

Temple, a good friend of Joe in his later years, is deeply influenced by the radical politics of 1968, and he shows it by flavoring the film with explosive footage of cops getting a beating at the 1976 Notting Hill carnival, and later shots of the Criminal Justice bill demos in London. His shots use great music to show sympathy for the demonstrators.

Strummer went through countless personal reinventions before hooking up with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon to form the Clash in 1976.

The film shows him starting out as a rockabilly squatter "Woody" busking in the London tube stations, turning into "Strummer" (so-named because he found playing "the fiddly bits" on guitar much harder than just strumming), to post-Clash solo musician and acting dabbler.

The Clash's critical and commercial breakthrough in the US came with London Calling, a double album released in January 1980 for the price of a single album (at the band's insistence).

They followed London Calling with a triple album (released for the price of a double album) in late 1980, entitled Sandinista! (with the catalog number FSLN1, from the Spanish initials of the Sandinista political movement, Frente Sandinista de Liberaci�n Nacional).

It is hard watching Joe and the Clash disintegrate. Topper Headon was fired on account of his on-going heroin addiction problem. Hearing the feuds and conflicting views of guitarist Mick Jones and drummers Terry Chimes and Topper Headon, cut with old interviews of Strummer, is quite illuminating on the band's direction and breakup.

One of the film's most poignant moments has a friend of Strummer's recall a phone call he got from the singer around 1991. Strummer had been watching the news and saw a missile destined to be fired on Iraq (during the Gulf War) painted with the slogan "Rock the Casbah" (the title of a Clash song), and was literally in tears.

In 1998 Joe was with a new band The Mescaleros. Joe totally reinvents his belief in politics and change.

At the end of each show, Strummer and the Mescaleros performed a cover of the classic resistance song "The Harder They Come, the Harder They Fall" by reggae great Jimmy Cliff.

He lets us know:

"And I keep on fighting for the things I want

Though I know that when you're dead you can't

But I'd rather be a free man in my grave

Than living as a puppet or a slave…"

For those who missed The Clash, Temple's film is a fascinating portrait, for Clash fans a must!

Melanie Lazarow
Joe Strummer: The future is unwritten
Directed by Julien Temple
In selected cinemas now