Jimmy spends much of his time with his Mod friends Chalky (Philip Davis), Dave (Mark Wingett), and Spider (Gary Shail). He has a day job, working in the mailroom at an advertising firm, but he resents his lowly station in life, which is reinforced by his own lack of ambition and interpersonal confusion. He is attracted to and semi-involved with Steph (Leslie Ash), a pretty local girl who moves in and out of his various circles. One day in a bathhouse he runs into Kevin (Ray Winstone), an old friend who has left the army and is now running with the Rockers, thus complicating the comfortably simplistic us-versus-them mentality that helps Jimmy make sense of his world. At home, he is in constant conflict with his parents (Kate Williams and Michael Elphick), who don’t understand him and his apparent aimlessness. Thus, everything in Jimmy’s life contributes directly to his alienation, fueling his sense of social and personal estrangement even as he reaches desperately for some kind of connection, which he imagines might be found in Ace Face (Sting), the unofficial leader of the Mods in whom he sees an ideal self.

In shooting the film in the rough-edged style of British social drama, first-time director Franc Roddam took a page from Ken Loach rather than Ken Russell, who directed the absurdly stylized film version of The Who’s legendary rock opera Tommy four years earlier. While Russell took the metaphysical and symbolic elements of The Who’s music and turned it into surreal, synthesized derangement, Roddam grounds Quadrophenia’s ideas about split personalities and social unrest in a relentlessly realist aesthetic. The film is, in this regard, extremely daring as it avoids pandering to Who fans who might have been looking for a direct visualization of the album; instead, Roddam (who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Humphries and Martin Stellman) uses the ideas in Pete Townshend’s music and lyrics as a jumping-off point. Music from the album is there, scattered throughout the film and employed quite extensively in the final moments (especially the powerful rock anthem “Love Reign O’er Me”), but it plays mostly as support, rather than structure. That is not to say, however, that music isn’t crucial to the film, as the world in which the characters live is fueled by the pop and rock music by which they define themselves and their allegiances. When Jimmy sits down in his living room and starts air-drumming to a television broadcast of The Who performing “Anyhow, Anyway, Anywhere,” he’s not just indulging a music preference, but rather performing his identity.

While frequently affecting and ambitious, Quadrophenia doesn’t always work if only because its protagonist is so willfully unapproachable. Daniels turns in a powerful performance as Jimmy, which means he conveys not just alienation from those around him in the narrative, but also from the audience. It is impossible to fully identify with him or feel for him, which is perhaps one of the biggest breaks from The Who’s album, where Jimmy was more of an abstract idea, rather than a recognizable person. Moving Jimmy from disembodied voice to fully realized character without providing any additional backstory or explanation, the film makes clear just how painfully vapid he is in his custom-tailored suits and drug-fueled rage. This, of course, is part of the film’s power, as it forces us to recognize both the socially determined and the selfish aspects of Jimmy’s plight—irreconcilable parts of an impossible tortured whole.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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