Editor’s Note: Normally this week, Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston would be down in Austin for South-By-Southwest’s film festival, catching as many premieres as he can in between tacos and fun walks down a crowded 6th Street. But like last year, SXSW 2022 is a virtual edition, so he’s at home like the rest of us. Luckily, he’s still watching all the films worth seeing, and reviewing them in our film section; keep it locked to our continuing coverage as the fest unfolds.
If you say the words “I get knocked down” around anybody who was alive in the early ’90s, even if you’re telling a story about how you got hit by a car while walking your dog, the words “and I get up again” will form in their heads and fill in the blank, as if you’ve somehow conjured up the ghost of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and lured them straight back to ’96. For a whole lot of musicians, having one of your songs be a cultural touchstone, a point of perpetual reference to a period in time in which your music meant something to someone, is the end-all-be-all for ambition. As has been pointed out time and time and again by parents not wanting their children to quit their job at the bank in order to go on tour with their anarcho-folk-punk band, you’re most likely not going to make it, and any success, no matter how minor, is ultimately worth it in the end.
But, God forbid, what if you have ideals you’re striving towards with your music? Ethics? What if you want to make a difference, god damn it, and you’re relegated to a meme, on the shelf with someone’s Life with Louie toys and Clinton administration playing cards? How do you handle that? Well, in the case of Dunstan Bruce, the aging former frontman of Chumbawamba, you make a movie that earnestly tries to grapple with that, where you face the embodiment of your success — a puckish evil man in a mask shaped like your band’s giant-toothed symbol — while trying to make your way forward with a new group, one that’s probably closer to what you intended Chumbawamba to be. That’s the central premise of I Get Knocked Down, which Bruce co-directed along with Sophie Robinson, which explores Bruce’s history with the group and his attempts to reconcile his ideals with the reality of his success, as well as him grappling with Father Time. As the grains of sand in the bottom of time’s hourglass grow larger and larger while those in the top dwindle, well, it’s only natural to reflect, and what results is a surprisingly clear-eyed look at his career and the successes and failures of his most famous project.
It feels like every three or four weeks someone will submit a post to Reddit’s “Today I Learned” subreddit about how they’d just discovered that Chumbawamba was an aggressively leftist band, as time has stripped away everything surrounding “Tubthumping” and left the song as an isolated and peppy cry for resilience floating in and out of soccer practice playlists. That, honestly, is a very natural reaction: It is surprising, to say the least, to find out that Chumbawamba once sounded like Crass, shouting and screaming diatribes from the stage while practicing what they preached off-stage, living communally and working within their community. But there was playful sonic experimentation going on at all times in the background, a desire to find The Shape of Punk to Come, which ultimately led the group down the path toward pop chart superstardom, almost by accident. They retained their provocation in their personalities — one only needs to see clips of Alice Nutter advocating for people to steal their record on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect to be reminded of how close they were to the Yippies in ideology — but their sound slowly obscured the message over time. I Get Knocked Down tries to reckon with all of that, being a surprising admission of failure on Bruce’s part while also an acknowledgment that this evolution might be a natural phenomenon that follows someone making, you know, a hit song.
The film is modern to a fault, as well: Bruce and Robinson seem like they’re trying to fit in with contemporary aesthetics on modern English television, which gives it a feel that it has a sell-by-date, at least in its style. Honestly, it’ll be interesting to see how this looks in twenty years, once fashionable things have inevitably curdle, which is a funny thing to think about a documentary about the frontman of Chumbawamba, but, again, the central conceit remains an invigorating one. Watching Bruce deal with the physical embodiment of that voice of doubt hanging around his head all of the time is pretty fascinating, given how it’s equally pessimistic as it is devastatingly honest, a form of accountability that’s not necessarily as self-pitying as it sounds as it is in practice, though it occasionally leans in that direction. Regardless, I Get Knocked Down is a swing at pushing the self-reflective rockumentary towards a new frontier, and even if it’s not wholly successful as it is making its case — selling your the rights to your song to Pontiac and donating the money to organizations is still, you know, allowing your sound to be identified with a company you hate — it’s a really compelling watch, bound to inspire countless more people to pick up that keyboard and type out “Hey, did y’all know that ‘Tubthumping’ was a political anthem?” for many more years to come.