Directed by Reginald Harkema, Scot McFayden, and Sam Dunn
Canada, 2014
If your knowledge of pop music is of a certain type, then you’ve heard of glam-rocker Alice Cooper but know almost nothing about him. In fact, the Tribeca 2014 documentary Super Duper Alice Cooper reveals the factoid that Vincent Furnier was originally the singer of a band called Alice Cooper, and that he changed his name to Alice Cooper to make the band (and, later, his solo act) easier to promote. That action says a lot about Cooper – his act, his ambitions, the sort of place that he has in music history – but Super Duper Alice Cooper isn’t quite interested in that. It’s not unlike one of Cooper’s many imitators, presenting the traditional information with flashy visuals.
The material is certainly nothing new: open on Vincent Furnier’s childhood and follow his life in a linear progression up until the present day. Recollections come from Furnier/Cooper himself, his bandmates and business partners, and admirers such as Iggy Pop and Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider. The story is told in exhaustive detail; most of the hatchets that might have been sharpened during Cooper’s heyday have been buried, and despite a live-fast-die-young lifestyle, most of the major players are still alive.
Directors Reginald Harkema, Scot McFayden, and Sam Dunn deserve accolades for employing a unique visual style. These interviews could easily have been presented as on-screen talking heads, with the occasional insertion of concert footage or photos from Rolling Stone magazine, as a million films have done before. Instead, computer tricks and other special-effects gimmicks are employed to animate the older photo and video evidence, turning Cooper’s entire life into a music video. The end product is not unlike Michael Jackson’s video for “Leave Me Alone,” updated for the 2010s.
The visual style helps make up for the fact that the film takes a very “this happened, and then this happened” approach to Cooper’s life. It might be said that Alice Cooper was the first postmodern band – they grew up watching their parents scandalized by the Beatles and Elvis Presley, took cues from Salvador Dali, then extended scandalization to its natural extreme – but that theme is not emphasized. It also might be said that Cooper’s act opened mainstream music’s eyes to androgyny and homosexuality in a way that not even David Bowie did, but this is not discussed aside from a few jokes that the members of Cooper “looked like girls.”
Most prominently, it might be said that cocaine preyed on a certain vulnerability in America, such that Cooper, who had already spent time in rehab for alcohol abuse and had thought he’d hit rock bottom, could be leveled by addiction nonetheless. That story is not told either. Every note in the Cooper drug saga is hit in the standard E! True Hollywood Story style, right down to a major story transition being emphasized with the line, “…and then I discovered cocaine.”
In exactly that way, some of the stylistic choices in this film are painfully on the nose – the use of Cooper’s song “I’m Going Home” for his return to Phoenix after a horrific cocaine bender, for instance. The negative impact of this is small, though, because a lot of Cooper’s career was on the nose. If after his first turn in rehab, Cooper is going to make an album about going into rehab, why wouldn’t the movie about his life be equally straightforward? In the end, Super Duper Alice Cooper is fun to look at, and it is likely to have a few things to say that its audience didn’t previously know. It’s not Hoop Dreams, but in the realm of documentary filmmaking, one could do a lot worse.
— Mark Young