Nick Broomfield’s The Stones and Brian Jones brims with piercing insights. Its subject is the musical virtuoso and gifted multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, the founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones, whose tumultuous, drug-fueled personal life got in the way of his prodigious talent and led to an early death at the age of 27. Relying heavily on eyewitness accounts from those who knew Jones, Broomfield creates a portrait that, rather than lionizing the troubled musician by seeking to reevaluate his life and legacy, presents a tragic tale of a deeply flawed and insecure individual who became a casualty of his own excess.
The film’s approach to recounting Jones’s story is deceptively simple. Over reams of archival footage—which include everything from home movies of Jones as a child to parties with the pre-famous Rolling Stones—Broomfield incorporates audio snippets of testimonies from Jones’s friends, lovers, and colleagues. And the results prove to be as haunting as they are fascinating.
Suffering from a myriad of insecurities and jealousies, which were only exacerbated by the emergence of Mick Jagger as the Stones’s leader and principle songwriter with Keith Richards—as well as a worsening drug dependency—Jones is revealed as a man consumed by self-loathing, and capable of staggering levels of cruelty. And via the film’s juxtaposition between footage of Jones performing in front of fawning crowds with the dark personal stories of those who knew him best, Broomfield bitingly undercuts the rock star’s veneer of public adoration.
The Stones and Brian Jones only falters in moments when it leans into showing the faces behind the interviews heard throughout. While matching the face to the voice proves useful at times, these interviews are also low-resolution Zoom videos, which feels incongruous in a film that’s otherwise content to play out as a haunting tapestry of archival ghosts.
But by focusing on the unfiltered stories coming from scores of varied sources—and by also including these sources’ shared regret over helplessly watching a man fall victim to himself—Broomfield grapples with his subject on a consistently intimate level. As a result, The Stones and Brian Jones is intensely charged with a level of emotion that most rockumentaries lack.
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