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Review

Life was apparently one long, drug-induced trip for Brian Jones, one of the founders of The Rolling Stones, and it wasn’t a good trip prior to his untimely death in 1969 at age 27. The incredible achievement of Stephen Woolley’s film on the rise and fall of Jones is that the filmmaker is cognizant of the fact that Jones cannot be separated from the times in which he flourished: the early to late 1960s. First-time director Woolley, Neil Jordan’s longtime producer, is astutely aware that the Swinging ‘60s were so much a part of what shaped Jones that the era itself is the star of Stoned. Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are only supporting players here. The film’s spot-on recreation of the period feels less like artifice than like a film that was actually made in 1969. It opens, Sunset Boulevard-style, with Jones (Leo Gregory) already dead, face down in his pool, and then flashes back as it depicts the whirlwind of people and events that energized and subsequently depleted Jones. Chief among these was Frank Thorogood (the extraordinary Paddy Considine), who became Jones’ handyman and so insinuated himself into the musician’s drug-and-sex-addled life that they became dangerously symbiotic. Stoned increasingly evolves into Thorogood’s story as Jones spirals into a state of oblivion and near-invisibility. The film travels full circle: Thorogood effectively steals Jones’s biopic just as he tried to appropriate much of the man’s life. Stoned ultimately makes a great double-bill with Performance, the 1970 Donald Cammell-Nicolas Roeg film in which, now in retrospect, Mick Jagger seems to be playing … Brian Jones.

 -- Joe Baltake