Few narratives recur as frequently as the rise and fall of a rock star. When juxtaposed against the sum total value of an artist’s contributions to music, the winding road of excesses can be a fascinating journey. But on its own, rehashing the same battles with drugs and alcohol becomes as rote as an average rerun of Behind The Music. It’s So Easy and Other Lies, the documentary adapted from former Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan’s autobiography, rarely clears that very low bar, failing to engage the viewer as it trots out the same tired beats of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.
That these clichéd narrative tropes really happened to McKagan is almost beside the point. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more baffling method of adapting a true story as It’s So Easy presents a curious hodgepodge of questionable storytelling styles. Intercut with the usual talking heads-style interview clips is the world’s most boring concert film as McKagan and his bland backing band sit on stage, MTV Unplugged-style, performing boring, blues-y renditions of famous GNR songs while he reads aloud from his book. Flat, high school sketchbook animated sequences get tossed into the mix as well, alongside shots of pages from McKagan’s book. The film has more in common with a Tim & Eric infomercial parody than anything Penelope Spheeris ever made.
There’s a dead-eyed gaze and pedestrian delivery to everything McKagan recites, reducing his own life story to little more than a hastily scrawled book report. He confesses smoking weed for the first time in the fourth grade, drinking alcohol in fifth, and moving to LSD in sixth. By middle school he has graduated to coke and codeine. He waxes nostalgic about the Seattle punk scene in which he grew up, highlighting various petty crimes and assembling a makeshift stage of milk crates and plywood in order to perform. When he laments the death of the scene at the hands of heroin, it’s hard to find any sense of true loss in his voice, given the flat way the chapter unfolds.
From there, it’s rinse and repeat. McKagan moves to LA, meets Slash, forms the band that would his life and gets really into vodka. GNR’s meteoric ascent is presented as a formality rather than a game changer. Running around in his teens and stealing cars gets swapped out for riding in jets with Nikki Sixx. The self-destruction intensifies after his divorce, itself a stirring plot point that gets glazed over for no apparent reason. Outside of the indelible image of McKagan kicking out his ex-wife with Halliburton luggage gifted from Aerosmith and keeping the dog, we’re never told enough about his marriage to feel much of anything about its dissolution.
The reason it’s so frustrating to watch this film turn McKagan into an uninspired cypher for typical rock decadence is that his story actually has many unique elements that get completely sidestepped. There appears to be a rich relationship between him and his older brother over the family’s history with anxiety and how McKagan’s addiction is tethered to self-medication. Once he’s determined to get clean, he does so under the tutelage of self-help sensei Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, a man who looks like Neil Breen playing a martial artist. After having fallen off the wagon, McKagan at 33 goes back to school to study accounting; a living rock legend reacquainting himself with the basics of economics. Any of these subplots could have been isolated and turned into their own sustainable project.
Instead, we stick to the well-worn trope of the phoenix who rises again, harping on about his second coming with Velvet Revolver, meeting a newer, hotter wife and becoming a father. Even that part of the arc becomes temporarily interesting as McKagan and his bandmates struggle with the transition from the rock lifestyle to clean living. When he relapses with pills and begins to falter, the weirdly patchwork structure of the film and its use of inspirational clips of Urquidez telling him to get up off the ground almost makes the film worthwhile.
But then you’re forced to listen to his shitty backing band score the scene as though they were playing the worst suburban sports bar in America. The film goes on for 10 minutes after its real conclusion, if only to provide payoff for the half-assed concert you’ve been intermittently subjected to.
It’s So Easy is blessed with an intriguing lead subject whose otherwise cookie cutter rock star origin story is tinged by multiple disparate pieces of eye-opening side quests. But the film lacks the ambition and creativity necessary to live up to the task of dramatizing McKagan’s story. Maybe just read the book – or listen to “Rocket Queen.”
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