OASIS: SUPERSONIC (Mat Whitecross). 122 minutes. Opens Thursday (October 27). See Listings. Rating: NNN
Okay, so I’m not an Oasis superfan. I know the songs and I like them fine, but I prefer my Beatlesque power pop to come from the actual Beatles, you know? So I am not the target audience for a two-hour oral history of the band’s meteoric rise in the age of Britpop.
If you are an Oasis superfan, however, Oasis: Supersonic will definitely give you what you want. Tracking the five years from volatile brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher forming their band in 1991 to their triumphant performance before a quarter of a million people at Knebworth in 1996, it’s as comprehensive a documentary as we’re likely to get, told by the band members themselves (and associated family members and tour buddies) in contemporary audio interviews played over archival footage.
It’s the same approach executive producer Asif Kapadia employed to great effect in Senna and Amy, and while Supersonic will delight Oasis fans with never-before-seen footage shot by the band themselves – including a stunning clip of Liam laying down those amazing vocals for Champagne Supernova on his first take – this movie pales next to Kapadia’s own films.
Senna and Amy used the disconnect between new interviews and old footage as a dramatic hook, subliminally reminding us that their subjects were no longer around to tell their own stories. The genius of those documentaries is that they used cinema to bring their dead subjects back to life, whereas Oasis: Supersonic is simply a record of a band that got really big and then broke up.
Director Mat Whitecross does deserve credit for digging into the truly awful domestic situation that forged the brothers’ contentious personalities – and the way the British tabloid press used that against them, because the British tabloid press are the lowest form of life on Earth – but there just aren’t any real stakes here, other than how awful the Gallagher boys could be to each other.
For those keeping score, Liam comes off looking like a knobhead for the ages, while Noel seems perpetually frustrated with the world around him. I know which one I’d like to see back in the studio.
